Humza Yousaf succeeds Nicola Sturgeon as SNP leader

[Emrys]

Last edited Mon Mar 27, 2023, 10:32 PM - Edit history (1)

Humza Yousaf is to succeed Nicola Sturgeon as SNP leader and Scotland's first minister after a vote of party members.

Mr Yousaf defeated rivals Kate Forbes and Ash Regan in a leadership contest that exposed deep divisions within the party.

The 37-year-old is the first Muslim to lead a major UK party.
...
Mr Yousaf is currently Scotland's health secretary and was widely assumed to be Ms Sturgeon's preferred successor, although she did not explicitly back any of the candidates in the contest.

The leadership election was decided by the Single Transferable Vote system, with 50,490 of the SNP's 72,169 members casting a ballot - the vast majority of them online.

After Ms Regan was eliminated in the first round, Mr Yousaf defeated Ms Forbes by 52% to 48% in the second round, with Mr Yousaf receiving 26,032 votes and Ms Forbes 23,890.

The new SNP leader will face a vote in the Scottish Parliament - which he is virtually certain to win - on Tuesday before becoming Scotland's sixth first minister.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-65086551

A historic day however you look at it, and whoever you backed in the leadership contest. We now have a leader of Scottish Labour, an SNP leader and a UK prime minister who are all from Asian backgrounds (for better or worse in some cases).

As it happens, Yousaf got my first preference, and Forbes my second. I didn't allocate a preference to Regan, for a variety of reasons.

It wasn't an easy choice between Yousaf and Forbes. Both have their strengths and some decided weaknesses. A couple of considerations tipped it for me.

Yousaf gained far more endorsements from SNP MSPs and MPs - many of whose opinions I respect - and that probably signals the possibility of more unity among the members of both parliaments, if not necessarily among SNP members as a whole. Portrayed as "the continuity candidate", I was pleased to see him defend the SNP government's achievements in its time in office.

The fact that Forbes chose to trash some of that record during the course of the hustings counted against her. It's one thing to be healthily critical of party policies and achievements, it's quite another to parrot some of the tired claims of unionists and the bulk of the media. On a similar consideration, I didn't appreciate Forbes's tendency to rewrite the party's manifesto on the hoof and sound unsettlingly like she might try to pull the party to the right on some issues, both social and economic. She's very self-assured as a media presence and undoubtedly talented, and I hope future cabinets manage to harness her abilities and her appeal in certain quarters - one of her self-proclaimed selling points was that she had higher ratings than Yousaf among the electorate at large, though whether that means they'd actually vote for the SNP is quite another question.

There remains the vote in the Scottish Parliament on who should take over from Nicola Sturgeon as First Minister when she formally resigns. The Opposition will no doubt put up its own candidates as a formality, but with the backing of the Scottish Greens and no doubt the vast majority if not all of his own party, the job looks like Yousaf's.

[peppertree]

1. I can just hear Republicans (and some Tories):

"Humza Yousaf!? Doesn't sound too Scottish does it? Maybe he can try with a kilt!"

[Emrys]

5. Yousaf's been known to rock a kilt quite often.

Here he is in 2018:



Sad to say, I lifted that photo from an article titled 'I carry a personal alarm' SNP minister Humza Yousaf fears for his life after racist death threats

[peppertree]

6. A cross-cultural man - and no doubt smart, too

I'm not surprised he's been threatened though. Just try showing that to a Republican acquaintance one of these days.

You might need to call 911 afterward (or tackle him to the floor).

[T_i_B]

2. I hope we don't get any more people trying to use a candidate's religion against them

Although sadly I think there will be plenty who will trash Yousaf on this point.

Especially given how Forbes campaign tended to get bogged down in arguments over her being a "wee free". Usually from people who don't know the first thing about the denomination she's a part of.

Mind you, I have SNP supporting relations, who would have probably deserted the nationalist cause if she'd been elected leader due to her stance on LBGT+ issues.

[Emrys]

3. It's long been an issue with Yousaf's ethnicity, let alone his religion.

Some of the crap on Twitter etc. has been - and still is to this very minute - disgraceful. He starts out with very low expectations from the more rabid unionists, rightwingers and general hobbyist racists, and I suspect it won't be the first time that this sort of arrogance and prejudice rebound on them. Having said that, much of the venom and patronizing shite about Sturgeon has been similarly disgraceful for many years, so it's par for the course for any prominent SNP politician, let alone a leader.

Yousaf's a somewhat "secular" Muslim - he embraces the faith and observes its festivals etc., but has backed a number of progressive policies that are anathema to more conservative Muslims. In this, he contrasts with Forbes, as she made no bones about her somewhat regressive views on marriage, abortion and gender etc., though claimed that somehow this would not affect her decision-making and leadership.

I felt her campaign was somewhat naive - not what I was looking for in a party leader! Maybe she thought that addressing her faith head-on in early interviews and hustings might mean she'd be able to move beyond it and talk about other issues, but the net effect was that it dogged her throughout and excited a lot of social media opposition from quite a large number - many of whom wouldn't have been able to vote for her in an election anyway, and wouldn't have been subject to her government's policies! The fact that her share of the vote was creditable in the end says more about her qualities other than her somewhat old-fashioned views on certain issues and her being courted by some decidedly conservative religious groups.

[NullTuples]

4. As I understand he was seen as a "continuity candidate" to Sturgeon re: women's & LGBTQ equality

Good write up on him:

"Humza Yousaf: Where does the new SNP leader stand on women's and transgender rights?"

https://www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/reports/a43427903/humza-yousaf-womens-transgender-rights/

Humza Yousaf on women's rights

In the lead up to his election as party leader, Yousaf pledged to "work ­tirelessly" to improve the rights of women and girls. Yousaf hopes to make abortion available up to 24 weeks in Scotland – given that some women are currently forced to travel to England for terminations later in pregnancy. What's more, Yousaf has vowed to "unequivocally" support legislation to set up buffer zones around abortion centres as well as continue to push forward on proposals to make misogyny an offence. Yousaf has also promised to ­fast-track free early learning and childcare for children aged one and two, with the aim to help more women get back to work. He's also pledged to extend childcare, if voted in as first minister tomorrow. As for the impact his leadership will have on the women he works with, Yousaf has said he will follow Sturgeon’s practice of having half of all cabinet posts filled by women."

Humza Yousaf on transgender rights

Like Sturgeon, Yousaf is a firm supporter of transgender rights. In December, he was one of the 86 MSPs who voted in favour of the Scottish Gender Recognition Reform bill, which would have made it easier for trans and non-binary people to obtain a gender-recognition certificate (GRC). The bill was later blocked by the UK government, which Yousaf and others described as an "unprecedented attack" on the Scottish parliament. "I am firmly committed to equality for everybody because your rights are my rights regardless of who you are," he said after the UK government’s use of a Section 35 order to block the legislation.

"My starting point is that I’ve been a minority in this country my whole life," Yousaf continued. "I have understood that you have to fight for your rights, but my rights don’t exist in a vacuum or in isolation. They exist because other people’s rights exist too."

However, Yousaf was previously forced to apologise for "any hurt caused" after the Scottish government sought to exempt "criticism of transgender identity" from hate crime laws. "We all want to ensure freedom of speech, including the freedom to disagree robustly with any policy, is protected. We also agree that this is not mutually exclusive to protecting the rights of people to be free from hatred," he wrote in a tweet in 2021. "I apologise for any hurt caused – was not my intention."

[Emrys]

7. A surprisingly insightful take on the Scottish political scene from Stephen Bush in the FT,

interspersed with my own reservations about it:

SNP’s era of public rows runs on
...
Humza Yousaf, pondering the question of what to do with former leadership candidate Kate Forbes, opted to offer her the post of rural affairs. Although the role is of strategic importance to the SNP — by bearing on the very votes for which the party is competing with the Conservatives — it isn’t a role of similar internal importance. Forbes has instead chosen to quit government and go to the backbenches.

How big of a deal is this? Well, it confirms that the SNP’s new era of open disagreement is going to run for a while longer and that Yousaf did not try particularly hard to keep Forbes in the fold.

https://www.ft.com/content/595d092a-077d-4da8-86bc-b688a8de2193

Twitter was alight last night with Forbes loyalists (and a multitude of unionist shit-stirrers) portraying Yousaf's offer of the post of Minister of Rural Affairs as a deliberate and petty attempt to "demote" her. Much dummy-spitting and some declarations of resigning from the SNP were mixed in.

The fact is that Forbes had indicated she wanted a less demanding portfolio than Finance (apart from anything else, she has a baby under one year old and broke into her maternity leave to stand in the leadership election). More significantly, portraying Rural Affairs as a relatively trivial ministry smacks of Scottish Central Belt-ism - just as UK politics is seen by many to be too London- and Southeast-centric, there's long been resentment that rural areas have seen less focus in policy debates.

This would have been a chance for Forbes to shake up that ministry and carry out some of the measures she championed during the hustings, and as a Western Isles MSP, it would have seemed right up her street given her current domestic situation. For her own reasons, she chose not to go for it and to return to the backbenches instead. She seems outwardly quite sangine about it. We'll have to wait and see if her fans eventually follow her lead.

Bush continues:

But one important thing not to do when discussing the SNP is to over-apply precedent or examples from other political parties in the UK, because the SNP is completely unlike the Conservative party, the Labour party or the Liberal Democrats.

The ideological gap between Yousaf and Forbes was incredibly large. On the one hand, you had a liberal candidate pledging to continue the centre-left approach targeted firmly on Scotland’s central belt and public sector workers, who powered its recent electoral successes. On the other, you had a social and fiscal conservative vowing to tear that approach up and to focus on the SNP’s old base of rural and affluent voters in its first breakthroughs in the 1970s and 1980s.

Bush goes on to examine the transfers of votes between the two frontrunners in the election. He spots that there were significant transfers of votes between the two at second preference level (there were a surprising number of transfers from Ash Regan to Humza Yousaf as well, but that's by the by). This chimes with my own experience. I gave Forbes my second preference. Had she won, I'd have had reservations about her becoming leader, but I'd have waited to see what she did with the role and how she set about trying to unite the party and form a government.

Bush points out that viewing the SNP through the same lens as applied to UK national parties is a mistake. The unifying theme for SNP members and voters is a quest for independence. The current stalemate with Westminster on that issue is a far greater cause of impatience and predictable infighting than any ideological differences on other issues and squabbling about the "pecking order" among the Holyrood ministries and whose career is being furthered or impeded.