Humza Yousaf takes the helm of sinking SNP

Humza Yousaf will succeed Nicola Sturgeon as first minister of Scotland as he emerged victorious from a bitter and divisive SNP leadership contest.

The result was much closer than expected. Yousaf pipped finance secretary Kate Forbes – with 52% of the SNP membership vote to Forbes’ 48% – after Ash Regan was eliminated in the first round. He becomes the first Muslim leader of a major UK political party.

Yousaf, Scotland’s 37-year-old transport minister, was the bookies’ favourite to succeed Sturgeon, and is seen as the continuity candidate. He has joked he would have the outgoing first minister “on speed dial.”

After a parliamentary vote on Tuesday, Yousaf will be formally sworn into office on Wednesday. He faces a daunting in-tray. One immediate job is to assemble a cabinet from the long list of parliamentarians who backed his campaign.

One dilemma: should he keep Forbes inside his new government? Polls point to Forbes being more popular among Scots than Yousaf, and the close leadership race among SNP members suggests she’s worth keeping on-side.

Pride could get in the way. In one of the fiery TV debates, Forbes told Yousaf: “You were transport minister and the trains were never on time, when you were justice secretary the police were stretched to breaking point, and now as health minister we’ve got record high waiting times”. 

Longer-term, Yousaf will have the aftermath of Sturgeon’s time in power to deal with – the very legacy he wants to “build on”.  

At 22%, Scotland has one of the largest budget deficits in the developed world. The Scottish Fiscal Commission, an independent body, said last week there was a £1.5bn black hole between demand for public services and the money to pay for them, and that gap will grow.

The decline in life expectancy for male and female Scots has accelerated under Sturgeon, while drug-related deaths have reached a record high for the seventh year running.

And what of the party’s raison d’être? In his victory speech, Yousaf said that under his leadership the SNP will put the “independence drive into fifth gear”. 

But the prospect of Scotland parting ways with the rest of the UK looks further away than ever. For one thing, Sturgeon’s departure has shattered SNP unity. The leadership contest has been highly damaging and divisive, with the candidates publically criticising their own party’s lack of progress on independence in the eight years of Sturgeon’s rule.

The latest polling gives no-voters a seven-point lead over yes-voters on the independence question, the largest gap since 2019. The membership figures fiasco drew unwelcome attention to the SNP’s haemorrhaging of loyal supporters – from 119,000 to 72,000 in just two years.

Labour is licking its lips. The party dominated Scottish politics for decades until it was all but wiped out in 2015. Now it has a big opportunity. The SNP’s 26-point gap over Labour in 2019 has narrowed to just 10 points today.

Yousaf may have come out on top, but after a disastrous few months for the SNP, Labour and the Union are the big winners.

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