Humza Yousaf’s SNP is more like a cult than a political project

The SNP has held on to power in Scotland through the force of personality of its leaders and the pursuit of independence at all costs. And like so many cults before it, the ending comes with guns blazing and helicopters circling or rather the British equivalent – a police tent on a suburban lawn, says Alys Denby

It all fell apart three months before the wedding day. I was due to marry my Scottish fiance at Glasgow’s majestic Winter Gardens in 2016 when a pane from the Victorian glass ceiling smashed, closing the venue and cancelling our plans. Our hastily rearranged wedding went ahead, but the Winter Gardens are not set to reopen until 2027 and many of the exotic plants have either been relocated or died.

It is emblematic of how Scotland has declined, becoming coarser, less dignified and less beautiful under the SNP. In their monomaniacal pursuit of independence they have allowed school standards and NHS waiting times to fall behind England, spent £400m on ferries that have never carried a single passenger and been forced into a humiliating climbdown on gender recognition reforms. 

Yet the downfall of Humza Yousaf wasn’t due to public dissatisfaction with this paltry record or disgust at the corruption allegations against his predecessor, but through the implosion of a backroom deal with the Greens. It’s not the precipitousness of the SNP’s collapse that’s astonishing but how well its support continues to hold up – polling neck and neck with Labour despite all its difficulties.

Some Conservatives have taken the opportunity to claim all this proves that devolution was a mistake. That would be somewhat credible if Westminster was a model of propriety compared to Holyrood, but it is not. The government has subjected the country to eight years of political chaos and a sequence of sleaze scandals that would make John Profumo blush, but no one is seriously saying that means the House of Commons should be abolished.

The problem isn’t the democratic institution, it’s the people in it. Since 2007, the SNP has held on to power in Scotland through the force of personality of its leaders and the pursuit of independence at all costs. It has attracted MPs and MSPs with a talent for bombastic rhetoric that never seemed to extend to disagreeing with anything Alex Salmond or Nicola Sturgeon ever said. It has often looked more like a cult than a political project. And like so many cults before it, the ending comes with guns blazing and helicopters circling or rather the British equivalent – a police tent on a suburban lawn.

Caught in the crossfire are the Scottish people, who have been let down by a government that continually placed its own political expediency above public services and style over substance. Yousaf spoke powerfully in his resignation speech of being, if only for a little while longer, a Scots-Asian First Minister in a country with a Hindu Prime Minister and a Muslim Mayor of London. Yet his animating mission and that of his party remains to divide Scotland from England – what is that if not a rejection of multiculturalism? Independence would leave Scotland smaller, weaker and more parochial. Breaking up this marriage of nations that makes Britain what it is would betray all the progress of which Yousaf claims to be so proud. 

Alys Denby is opinion and features editor of City A.M.