The resignation of high-profile politicians is generally precipitated by scandal, electoral defeat, or political crisis. This has long been the case in Holyrood. Henry Mcleish remains Scotland’s shortest-serving First Minister having quit amidst ‘Officegate’ in 2001. Jack McConnell resigned after he lost the 2007 Scottish election to Alex Salmond, who himself left Bute House after the 2014 Independence referendum. Last year, Nicola Sturgeon jumped before Operation Branchform hit the headlines.
Last week it was different. There was no such cliff edge for Humza Yousaf. His demise was more gradual with the final throes of his leadership characterised less by scandal than skullduggery. Tempting as it may be to point to the collapse of the Bute House Agreement to explain the developments of the last two weeks, this assessment neglects the structurally determined challenges that perpetually thwarted Yousaf’s leadership. It was these factors that, when combined with days of political wrangling, left the First Minister at the mercy of Douglas Ross’s ‘Motion of No Confidence’, exposing an exhausted SNP and a dilapidated political class.
In many ways, the seeds of Humza Yousaf’s demise were sown the moment he took office. To suggest he was dealt a bad hand would be an understatement, least of all because, within months of his election, his predecessor had been arrested. Nicola Sturgeon’s careful management of Scotland’s political sphere had unravelled by the time she left office. The fallacy of a second independence referendum was obvious, worn out by repeated but unrealised promises. This was cemented when Sturgeon’s final gamble backfired in the UK Supreme Court, which ruled that Holyrood did not have the authority to hold another referendum.
For years, Sturgeon’s mantra that “independence was closer than ever” held the SNP’s disparate social base together. When this fell apart internal disagreements, once buried in service to the unifying cause, bubbled to the surface. These divisions were already evident during the testy leadership contest to elect Sturgeon’s successor. Yousaf narrowly won that election but the writing was already on the wall.
Nicola Sturgeon put herself beyond reproach as First Minister. She avoided Holyrood’s political fray and, for many years, steered clear of internal party squabbles instead cultivating her own image as the leader of a ‘state in waiting’. At the 2021 Holyrood election, Sturgeon asked for a personal mandate from the people of Scotland. This option was never available to Humza Yousaf. The contest had been too tight and his Ministerial record savaged on television by his closest rival.
Having stood as the continuity candidate, Humza Yousaf never escaped Sturgeon’s shadow or carved out his own distinct base within the SNP. Nicola Sturgeon’s surprise appearance at SNP conference last October, for example, not only overshadowed her successor but did so with the support of his most senior government ministers. Ultimately, this reliance on the Party’s old guard sealed Yousaf’s fate last week as they lined up John Swinney for the job.
Without command of his party, the political acumen of his predecessor or a viable route to a second referendum, Humza Yousaf faced an impossible task: Managing the collapsing Sturgeon consensus.
Nicola Sturgeon’s Scottish Government walked a tightrope, balancing disparate interests by appealing to everyone and siding with no one. By developing partnerships between the private sector, civil society, and government, Sturgeon could present a united, but ostensibly class-neutral front. If an overarching vision existed, then it depended on subordinating the interests of the people of Scotland to the maintenance of this political consensus. This arrangement was always fragile. Taped together by the promise of independence and wrapped in progressive rhetoric, the Scottish Government could only evade questions regarding its failure to deliver meaningful change, while consistently empowering capital, for so long.
This, along with Strugeon’s Bute House Agreement, was Humza Yousaf’s inheritance. Sturgeon brought the Scottish Greens into government after the 2021 Holyrood elections and neutralised arguably the only Party represented at Holyrood that regularly criticised the SNP from their left flank. Quickly Green Ministers capitulated by putting their name to PFI deals, heralding the sale of Scotland’s natural assets and waving through austerity budgets.
These challenges, that Sturgeon’s government once navigated, bruised Humza Yousaf. Where one once courted Nancy Pelosi in Washington, the other faced uproar for inviting Turkey’s Erdogan to Scotland. Where one won plaudits for setting climate targets Scotland was always unlikely to meet, the other was criticised for abandoning them. With the gradualist approach to independence in tatters, October 18th 2023, when Sturgeon had promised a second referendum, came and went. The SNP’s strategy to break up the British state was reduced to 13 lengthy papers, titled ‘Building a New Scotland’, to ‘form a prospectus’ for an independent state. A Party famous for its discipline descended into very public infighting. Scotland’s media joined in on the act. Rather than focus on the broader context of a political project in crisis, the lobby opted for personal attacks on Humza Yousaf. Meanwhile, just as before, capital was a constant beneficiary. Nicola Sturgeon oversaw Scotland’s first ‘green’ freeports. Humza Yousaf followed up with Scottish ‘investment zones’ six months later.
The SNP’s political project was already hollow by the time the Scottish Green Party announced their intention to hold an EGM on the future of the Bute House Agreement late last month. The immediate causes of the vote were the Scottish Government’s decision to pause the prescription of puberty blockers in Scotland and abandon their 2030 climate targets. The latter is significant, not least because Scottish Green Ministers had already supported an array of measures that entrusted Scotland’s just transition to the market. With the future of his government in doubt, Humza Yousaf unceremoniously tanked the Bute House Agreement and sacked his Green ministers. He failed to foresee the response. Lorna Slater and Patrick Harvie quickly accused their former boss of “betraying future generations”, insisting he was pressured by “reactionary forces” within his Party. These were strong words from two politicians who mere months ago had voted to slash £200 million from Scotland’s housing budget. Having threatened to resign should party members vote to leave the government, the Scottish Greens’ leadership then announced their intention to ally with Douglas Ross to bring down the First Minister.
The entire display was an exercise in concocted outrage. It was only when Humza Yousaf proved incapable of maintaining Sturgeon’s consensus that the relationship with the Scottish Greens grew fractious. Indeed, the Greens’ behaviour crystallises just how eager they were to trade credibility for power – a desperation the SNP had exploited since 2021.
Within the space of 10 days, Humza Yousaf had gone from leading a stable, if stagnant, government to announcing his resignation. In that time, there was no scandal and no policy change more drastic than that which had come before. Why then the sudden and apparently uniform turn on the First Minister?
The truth is Humza Yousaf was nominated as the fall guy not just for the SNP, but the entire parliament. Holyrood is in obvious decline. The parliament Donald Dewar predicted would become a “voice to shape Scotland” today does anything but. The lack of appetite for change among Scotland’s governing class has reduced political aspirations so much that parochial squabbling is often all that remains. The fate of wood-burning stoves, for example, is deemed an issue of national importance. MSP’s make themselves look busy with constant campaigns to ban things but have little interest in the root causes of Scotland’s social problems. When major changes do come to parliament, their plan, design and implementation is invariably outsourced to the private sector by a government lacking the capacity to deliver. This unspoken consensus unites the chamber.
On the day that Humza Yousaf resigned, the Herald revealed that Scotland has lost more than £250bn to foreign direct investment since devolution began – a level of wealth loss more than almost any developed country which is not a tax haven. The prospect of any current Holyrood Party leader prosecuting a political argument about Scotland’s dependence on extractive economics is so unlikely it’s almost unimaginable. Few MSPs show any interest in breaking with the ostensibly class-neutral neoliberalism that underpins the Scottish Government. Phoney culture wars, however, allow political fault lines to be redrawn on alternative ground. They provide a convenient distraction from more fundamental questions for a political class with little ambition but to justify its own existence.
It is no wonder then that Scots are increasingly apathetic toward their parliament. Public services are collapsing and local government is on its knees yet the electorate is offered only better managed decline. Politics has faded to shades of grey. This is why MSP’s seized the opportunity presented by Yousaf’s demise to disguise the chamber’s anti-politics and rearrange the deck chairs.
As neoliberalism took root across the Atlantic in the latter half of the last century, political theorists devised the concept of the ‘Cartel Party’. Their view held that as democratic participation declined political parties did not compete but colluded to protect their shared interests. Of particular relevance to Scotland is the notion that the ‘Cartel Party’ looks less to the electorate for support than to the state. Over their 17 years in power, the SNP have blurred the lines between government and party. Until recently, internal party factions were unnecessary as they had been replaced by the trappings of power.
In their analysis of Cartel Parties, Richard Katz and Peter Mai write that, “the governing of mainstream parties becomes so similar in structural characteristics, policy proposals,
personnel types, and self-referential interests that it becomes reasonable to think about “the parties” as a group, rather than as individual parties to be considered independently.” This is an increasingly accurate description of the Scottish Parliament, displayed not only by the fall of Humza Yousaf but the coronation of his successor.
In February 2023, John Swinney questioned whether Kate Forbes was an appropriate candidate for First Minister given her reactionary views on issues such as gay marriage. Fast forward 15 months and the new SNP leader’s concerns have evaporated. To assure his ascendency to the SNP leadership, Swinney offered the Highland MSP a “significant” role in his government. Under the guise of ‘grown-up politics’, the divisions that had plagued the SNP for months were resolved in the blink of an eye. Stitching together the SNP’s exhausted political project so that it may limp on a little further ultimately trumped political principle.
While John Swinney may have tacitly supported Humza Yousaf’s leadership bid, the apparent ease with which he and Kate Forbes struck their newfound alliance is hardly surprising. Economically the two are aligned. In 2008, John Swinney brought a paper to the Scottish Government cabinet that suggested privatising both CalMac’s ferry fleet and Scottish Water. The following year he proposed a flat tax to replace council tax. Piping Tory chancellor Geroge Osborne to the post, Swinney announced plans to give local councils the power to lower business rates – but not raise them – in 2015. As education secretary, Swinney was at the heart of the scandal that saw working-class Scottish pupils disadvantaged on account of their postcodes. A safe pair of hands perhaps, but for whom? This ministerial record will be of no concern to Kate Forbes, who the Spectator heralded as a “tartan Thatcher” after her 2022 Scottish Government Spending Review proposed cutting up to 30,000 public sector jobs.
In the earliest days of Holyrood, there was no precedent on which to base the construction of the new parliament. New MSPs didn’t know precisely what to do with themselves, recalls the former Labour MSP Mike Watson. 25 years later, the events of the last week remind us that this aimlessness remains but not for John Swinney and certainly not for Kate Forbes. Where
Yousaf defaulted to neoliberalism, their government’s fiscal conservatism is likely to be far more obvious. We can but hope that this will serve as a moment of political clarity for the left, who must match their apparent commitment to the status quo with our own politics of transformation.