Humza interruptus
Labour Hub Editors
As the former First Minister of Scotland departs to write his pamphlet-length memoir of political achievement, Stephen Low explores how it all went so wrong.  So, farewell then, Humza Yousaf. Well, sort of. Scotland’s here-today, gone-in-a-few-weeks First Minister took the decision on Thursday to end his coalition with the Scottish Green Party. He summoned the…
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Labour Hub
As the former First Minister of Scotland departs to write his pamphlet-length memoir of political achievement, Stephen Low explores how it all went so wrong.

So, farewell then, Humza Yousaf. Well, sort of.

Scotland’s here-today, gone-in-a-few-weeks First Minister took the decision on Thursday to end his coalition with the Scottish Green Party. He summoned the Greens’ co-leaders, Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater, to an early morning meeting, told them he was ending the Bute House Agreement, the formal name of the power-sharing deal, and sacked them from their ministerial jobs.

Since then it’s been a tale, whoever has been telling it, “full of sound and fury” and while it may not signify “nothing” it signifies a good deal less than is usually made out.

What we are witnessing in and around Holyrood is, as Regis Debray put it, “a crisis in the system being confused with a crisis of the system. Without anyone noticing that the former is capable precisely of enabling the latter to be avoided.“ Although it is not so much ‘avoided’ as ‘denied’.

Whoever ends up in which seat in Holyrood, none of the underlying issues – a Parliament increasingly incapable of passing workable legislation, a government which mistakes performing for delivering, an evisceration of local government and its replacement with a third sector client state, to state only the most obvious – will have been considered, far less addressed.

What has been of some interest has been watching the rewriting of history, as it has been happening, not least by an embittered leadership of the Scottish Greens.

Humza took the decision to torpedo the Bute House Agreement because it looked likely that a vote of Scottish Green Party members might do so first. Media voices, mostly ones hostile to the SNP incidentally, started to talk about how weak Humza would look if it were a small room of Greens who ended the Bute House Agreement. They talked; Humza listened; Lorna and Patrick got their jotters.

The Scottish Green Party Emergency General Meeting which would have decided on the Bute House Agreement wasn’t, as might have been expected, prompted by the Scottish Government’s decision to abandon the climate change targets it had written into law. That was a watering down which happened with Green ministerial approval.

Rather it was prompted by the Scottish Government’s response to the report of the Cass Review into gender identity services for children and young people. The Rainbow Greens, the LGBTQIA+ section of the Scottish Greens, describe the report as an “internationally discredited social murder charter”. The Scottish Government response was perhaps unsurprisingly, more low key, causing much disquiet amongst the Rainbow Greens. They wanted the report rejected. The news that gender clinics in Scotland had already acted on some of the Cass recommendations was the final straw and the Rainbow Greens launched a petition to withdraw from the Bute House Agreement because of clinical decisions not to prescribe puberty blockers to children.

This gained support from a wider section of the membership. They, while presumably not indifferent to social murder, seemed more concerned with that day’s other news, which was the abandonment of the climate targets. Patrick Harvie then began a round of media appearances where he was frank that he didn’t know how his party would vote culminating in ‘back me or sack me’ newspaper articles.

The Scottish Greens, it’s fair to say, did not take their ejection from government calmly. Immediately after being sacked, they issued a statement that in Spinal Tap parlance ‘went all the way up to eleven’. Despite Patrick Harvie repeatedly saying he didn’t know how the vote would go, and ‘back me or sack me’ appeals in newspapers, any uncertainty that the Scottish Greens were anything other than foursquare behind the Bute House Agreement was stoutly denied.

The Green ex-ministers “were confident” members would have endorsed the Bute House Agreement. Yet somehow they had also “put their own political careers on the line” for the deal even though while in government they had been “let down by the SNP time and time again”. In sacking Lorna Slater as Minister for Green Skills and the Circular Economy, Humza Yousaf had shown “cowardice” and was “selling out future generations”. Patrick Harvie’s intervention at First Minister’s Questions a few hours later, was less a question than the serving up of a platter of sour grapes.

What the leadership of the Greens can’t admit is that their presence in government was precisely to stop them doing things. They were brought into government in order that they couldn’t embarrass the SNP by exposing failures, such as the exams debacle in the previous parliament. Then working class kids had been discriminated against by the scheme for estimating exam results during Covid. The SNP minority government refused to admit anything was wrong until a motion of no confidence was placed in then Education Secretary John Swinney.

For the price of two junior ministries in this parliament the SNP insured themselves against any possible recurrence. More significantly, the Greens were now unable to embarrass the SNP by advancing initiatives about Independence. The Greens also made themselves useful by being advocates for the abandonment of radical policies, like a publicly owned energy company, robustly defended by Lorna Slater.

It has all but escaped notice in the last week, that if Humza Yousaf and his government had a track record of delivery and achievement, he wouldn’t have appeared weak – or need to worry if he had. Sadly for him, and the rest of us, he did not.

There are crises across public services. The NHS currently has one in six of the population on a waiting list. Schools are underperforming and colleges are underfunded and mismanaged. The care system has a huge recruitment and retention issue. The Scottish Government accepted four years ago the need to institute a sectoral bargaining arrangement for social care, but they haven’t been able to do so. The scandal of undelivered ferries, crippling for Scotland’s island communities, drags on. In the midst of a housing crisis, there is a cut to the affordable housing budget, and so on.

Nor is it simply the case that inability to deliver is restricted to the clique gathered at the top of the SNP. The parliament as whole has been increasingly ineffective. Bills are poorly drafted and parliamentary scrutiny is inept, with the result that legislation reaches the statute book that is nigh on incapable of being introduced.

Recently we have had the Hate Crime Act, passed four years ago – but so flawed it has taken this long to go live and so incoherent it was rendered inoperative by a series of tweets from JK Rowling. Then there was the Gender Recognition Act – well-meaning but so poorly put together that the UK Government had not one, but two, open and shut cases under the Scotland Act to strike it down.

Going live on the same day as the Hate Crime Act was the so called Safe Staffing Act: that too has taken four years after being passed to go live. It was meant to provide new rights to staff to report shortages and unsafe staffing levels, but only tiny numbers of staff have been trained in their rights and the majority of staff are unaware of its existence.

Last month there was the first stage vote of the National Care Service (Scotland) Bill. Despite the name, this is a local government-destroying, outsourcing and marketisation plan. It’s also a shambles. The Scottish government announced in advance that they would be withdrawing a lot of the Bill as published, but were incapable of explaining how their replacement plans would work. The SNP and Greens voted it through anyway.

It is easy to criticise Humza for not thinking through the implications of his sacking of the Greens. It is, though, entirely typical of how Scotland is run. Our MSPs do drama not detail, and for government and opposition alike, legislation is more about striking a pose than solving a problem.

And so we are back to more or less where we were last year. Humza departs to write his pamphlet-length memoir of political achievement, and the party establishment scramble around to find a continuity candidate and stop Kate Forbes. Various names are already in the frame, such as John Swinney, the day before the day before yesterday’s man, and several others who, but for their failures, have risen entirely without trace.

How to sum up this new, but not new situation “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss,” might seem apt, but we’ve done that already. Some might suggest “First time as tragedy, second time as farce” – but that remark applies to “great world historical facts and persons” – so literally nothing in Scottish politics applies.

Stephen Low is a member of Glasgow Southside CLP. He is a former member of Labour’s Scottish Executive and part of the Red Paper Collective