The problem is not just the SNP but the disaster of devolution
The departure of Humza Yousaf from office as First Minister of Scotland was as gruesome and embarrassing as every moment throughout his occupation of the post. It was clear from Yousaf’s demeanour at the Bute House podium that he felt humbled to deliver an announcement more significant than the abdication broadcast of Edward VIII and that he was weighed down by the awareness of the magnitude of his place in history.
To the end, Humza Yousaf demonstrated his inalienable right to the title of leading buffoon in the Lilliputian polity of devolved Scotland, despite a strong challenge from Patrick Harvie. Scottish independence felt “frustratingly close”, claimed the outgoing First Minister, which suggested he had not read an opinion poll for the duration of his year in office. He confessed he had not realised how hurt the Greens would be by their ejection from government at an 8am meeting: clearly, the politically sophisticated First Minister had believed the seven Green MSPs would disinterestedly react to their defenestration by obligingly lining up to support Yousaf in a no-confidence debate.
The wisdom he had displayed throughout his time in office inspired him to offer statesmanlike advice to his fellow politicians. “Each and every one of us must resist the temptation of populism…”. On that principle, at least, Yousaf has a one hundred per cent record of consistency – as have the other politicians whom he was addressing. No soupçon of the popular will has ever been allowed to influence the politics of devolution at Holyrood, where consultations are dutifully held on all contentious legislation and, when the public input proves overwhelmingly hostile, it is sedulously ignored.
“If only every person in Scotland could be afforded the opportunity to be First Minister for just one day,” said Yousaf wistfully, conjuring a vision belonging more to the world of J.K. Rowling – if such a cancelled person’s name could be mentioned in polite society – than the forum of real-life politics. As with so much of the twaddle uttered by the First Minister, such juvenile speculation spoke eloquently to the infantilisation of Scottish politics on the SNP’s watch.
Finally, there came the tearful hamming of an Oscars acceptance speech: “To my wonderful wife, my beautiful children and my wider family for putting up with me over the years…”. Aw, puleeze! Yousaf, lachrymose at the prospect of his own political demise, had no tears, nor the slightest concern, for a Scottish pensioner hauled off to a police station for alleged hate crime under his Orwellian legislation, for children deprived of life opportunities due to the precipitous decline in Scottish education under the SNP, or patients denied timely healthcare due to the implosion of the Scottish NHS under the same regime.
The media are asking the wrong questions about Humza Yousaf. Instead of trying to work out how precisely he came to lose power, they should be asking themselves how so pathetically inadequate a man came to hold office in the first place. They would not have far to look, since exactly the same squalid process is being enacted at present, as the SNP establishment, the party’s “old guard”, is organising a pile-on in support of the Ghost of Christmas Past – tired re-tread John Swinney – to return as party leader, a post from which he was forced to resign in 2004 after presiding over a series of catastrophic elections.
The reason for the orchestrated tsunami of support for Swinney is the establishment’s desire to ensure a coronation and avoid the need to hold a leadership election, which could remove the selection of a new leader from its hands, if the party members were to assert themselves. The collective leadership has still not recovered from the shock of Kate Forbes gaining 48 per cent of the vote to Humza Yousaf’s 52 per cent last time out – too close a call for the entitled coterie that controls the SNP.
The idea was to build up such a level of support for Swinney as to present Kate Forbes, if she should have any notion of resuming her leadership challenge, with a fait accompli. But she has already gone public with the fact she is considering standing again. She knows well that the party establishment is implacably opposed to her because of her social conservatism, but her hope might be to win over the ordinary membership in a leadership election.
Unfortunately for her hopes, the anti-Christian abuse and far-left gender policies of her opponents prompted 30,000 of her supporters to resign from the party in disgust, removing her core support and putative majority in any new leadership election. It remains to be seen whether her going on manoeuvres this time portends an actual leadership challenge or is a bargaining counter to secure her a senior post in the SNP cabinet.
On the other hand, a Swinney government, precariously situated on the rubble of past failures and confronted by both a general election and a Holyrood contest within the next two years, might be an ideal administration for an aspiring leader to remain out of. Forcing a leadership election, however, would mean the membership owed the exercise of its suffrage to Kate Forbes, a useful addition to her political CV for future challenges.
The lemmimg-like charge of the SNP leadership towards the unappealing candidature of John Swinney is a reflection of how desperate things are for the nationalists. Swinney has, as in Nigel Farage’s memorable description of EU president Count Herman Van Rompuy, the charisma of a damp rag. He has already served as SNP leader for four years (2000-2004) and failed abysmally.
So far as the controversial policies, attributed to Green influence, that have laid low the SNP are concerned, Swinney was prominent in promoting all of them, from the Gender Recognition Bill to the Hate Crime Act. The notion of him as any kind of new broom or turning of the page is absurd: like Yousaf before him, he is, to the point of caricature, Continuity Sturgeon. For the SNP is still under the influence of the Queen Over the Water, the disgraced Nicola Sturgeon who, from her exile at Uddingston-les-Deux-Églises, continues to dictate party policy.
Her influence was obvious in the SNP establishment’s decision to veto any deal Humza Yousaf might make with the hated Alba party. No one has denied Alex Salmond’s claim that, as late as 7.30 am on the day of his resignation, Yousaf was on the telephone to Alba in conciliatory tones. It is clear that Swinney is Sturgeon’s continuity candidate, with all that implies for the SNP’s electoral prospects. At the last leadership election, Swinney’s description of Kate Forbes as not an “appropriate” person to be First Minister, due to her Christian views and opposition to same-sex marriage, reflected the prejudices of the hard-left SNP establishment.
The latest Ipsos MORI poll shows that Kate Forbes is six points ahead of John Swinney among the general public, but among SNP voters Swinney is ahead by nine points. This reflects perfectly the bubble mentality of the party and why its support is falling. By nurturing its core vote, the SNP will lose seats at both Westminster and Holyrood, and consequently power. The Sturgeon regime successfully welded far-left cultural prejudices onto the separatist aspiration, thus excluding potential centrist and right-wing support: welcome to Tartan Corbynism, with the same electoral liabilities.
It looks as if this lethal conjunction will exclude Kate Forbes and any other moderate from power in the SNP for the foreseeable future. This is tremendously good news for unionists: it means that, by diluting the ambition for separatism with another political priority that is irrelevant, Scottish independence is again a distant prospect. Kate Forbes is not spectacularly brilliant or formidable: she is simply a normal person among a bunch of ideologues, with the potential to popularise nationalism beyond its core base.
That is something unionists should dread; but it seems the imposition of leftist ideology on what should be a neutral constitutional proposition is about to remove the SNP from serious political contention for a generation and that its only prominent member with broad appeal will be excluded from the leadership. For the Union and its supporters, that is good news.
But there is something else to be considered. While the demise of the SNP will remove the threat of separatism for the foreseeable future, in no other respect is there light at the end of the Scottish tunnel. Apart from the constitutional issue, Labour offers no hope of improvement. Labour MSPs are clones of the SNP. In the vote on the Scottish Hate Crime Bill, passed by a parliament with no revising chamber, of the 82 intuitively totalitarian MSPs who imposed this extreme measure on their fellow countrymen, Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar led 15 of his MSPs in supporting it, with just three Labour members opposing and one abstaining.
The problem goes beyond the SNP: the real cause of Scotland’s crumbling public services, its fissiparous cultural divisions, its stifled economy and its voluntary abdication of hard-won freedoms is devolution. Under devolution, Scotland has become infantilised and diminished: the landscape of Scottish public life resembles a world viewed through the wrong end of a telescope. Scots have become small-minded, as evidenced by the vogue for attaching the apologetic prefix “wee” to everything.
Scotland always had an emigration problem, but it was assumed economic progress would end it. Ironically, the claim was even made that devolution would reduce emigration; today, Scotland’s brightest people do not hang around to be bullied by the pygmy politicians at Holyrood, but head off to London, New York, Singapore and a hundred other destinations more welcoming of their talents than their high-tax homeland. Emigration also offers the prospect of a proper schooling for their children, no longer available in the country that once led the world in public education.
The tragedy of Humza Yousaf was not that he fell from office, but that he was representative of the calibre of politician that is currently destroying Scotland. For the past 17 years that task has been the work of the SNP; but it was New Labour, notably Tony Blair and Donald Dewar (“the Father of the Nation” Lol), that launched the catastrophic devolution project and George Robertson, as shadow Scottish secretary, who told us that “Devolution will kill nationalism stone dead.”
Humza Yousaf was just the latest buffoon to degrade Scottish public life, but he was by no means the first or, predictably, the last.
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