Humza Yousaf has been in an uphill battle to rebuild the SNP’s reputation after a series of scandals rocked his party over this past year. Can Yousaf reverse the political trajectory in time?
The continuity candidate in crisis
“One of the things that was rock solid throughout Sturgeon’s tenure was the public’s belief in SNP competence – that has fallen away significantly over the past 12 months, while voters have watched the Scottish government lurch from crisis to crisis,” Libby says.
When he was running to be leader of the SNP, Yousaf made it clear that he was the continuity candidate, to differentiate himself from Kate Forbes and push forward Sturgeon’s progressive agenda. Sturgeon’s abrupt departure created a vacuum and he promised to stop the party from coming apart at the seams. But Yousaf has not managed to stabilise the SNP, largely due to a succession of scandals and crises that have made it difficult for him to pave any kind of political path.
Operation Branchform, the investigation into the party’s finances, has been the biggest ongoing crisis Yousaf has had to deal with. Nobody who was arrested and questioned is in government or part of the SNP hierarchy any longer, but the investigation continues to hurt the party’s reputation, as the opposition and even members of his own party wield the inquiry like a hammer against Yousaf.
Despite his loyalty to Sturgeon, Yousaf has delayed, redrawn or reversed a number of key policy commitments including a ban on alcohol advertising, a controversial bottle and can recycling scheme and plans to protect marine areas from over-fishing. “Early on, it was clear that Yousaf wanted to make a clean sweep of a range of inherited policies that were causing serious unhappiness amongst voters as well as sections of his own party, but he was also stuck with two hugely problematic areas that Sturgen had not resolved - gender recognition reform and independence strategy,” Libby explains.
Popularity contest
Yousaf was always going to have big shoes to fill because Nicola Sturgeon was unusually popular for any political leader in the UK. Even as she exited political life, she remained Scotland’s most popular leader, and during the height of her appeal her approval ratings were stratospheric. “Even now, there is still a great deal of residual fondness and support for Sturgeon, although this may have eroded after the UK Covid Inquiry revealed a culture of secrecy around her handling of the pandemic,” Libby says. “And so, he has had this huge challenge of really imprinting himself on the minds of the electorate.”
As Libby and the Guardian’s Scotland editor, Severin Carrell, explain in this article, with both party and government lurching from crisis to crisis since last February, Yousaf simply hasn’t had to breathing space to leave an impression on voters, and polling shows significant numbers remain unimpressed or undecided. “What we’ve also seen is significant public sympathy for his position on Gaza – both when he spoke emotionally about his own in-laws being trapped there and when he was one of the first leaders to call for a ceasefire, public approval followed.” But the most recent polls indicate that the party could sustain significant losses at the next general election, potentially losing 24 of its 43 seats.
The threat from Labour
For the first time in over a decade, Scottish Labour stands a real chance to win a substantial number of seats. “People’s constitutional preferences are decoupling from their preferences at the ballot box for the first time since 2014,” Libby says. Every election of the past decade has, to some degree, been a proxy for the independence referendum. But the political tides have changed in the past 12 months, allowing for Scottish Labour to independence voters directly, by urging them to defect from the SNP to “boot the Tories out”.
In the Rutherglen and Hamilton West byelection, Labour trounced the SNP with a 20-point swing. If that sort of movement was repeated in a general election, the SNP could lose dozens of safe seats, so the stakes could not be higher for Yousaf.
The platform
Libby points out that Yousaf and the SNP have responded to this political shift by turning down the dial on the independence issue. “After the thrashing they received in the Rutherglen and Hamilton West byelection, they got a lot of feedback on the doorsteps there that the party was too focused on leaving the UK and did not say enough about the cost of living crisis,” Libby says.
The other reason for the change in emphasis might be found in a headache-inducing amendment that the party adopted at its conference in October. It stated that if the SNP wins a majority of Scotland’s Westminster seats at the general election, it will have the mandate to negotiate independence with the UK government. The problem is that they have set a target that all of the current polls suggest they are going to struggle to meet – a quandary the SNP does not want to draw attention to.
The mood in the SNP has changed significantly over the past year. A party that was known for its discipline is now openly arguing with itself. “I think the party just feels like it’s in disarray in a way that it hasn’t previously been, and a lot of the loyalty has definitely evaporated,” Libby says. And the public is attune to this shift: “The SNP has been in government for a long time and people are tired.”
