Good spot.
Do’h! I cannot believe I did that. Thank you for the correction.
I guess, ref @Stanislaus’ comments upthread I had been mesmerized by all the recent Tory PM turnover and had unconsciously glued Blair+Brown into that mold / mould. I swear it was not an intended dig that “New Labour” was simply the Tory wolf redressed in sheep’s clothing as Tory-Lite.
With the changing laws & customs about snap elections versus fixed-term parliaments and back again, I’ve a bit lost the train here. ISTM that if there’s to be any more substance to the legitimacy argument than simple carping, it can only be in the context where the newly-sitting PM has the ability to call an election quickly. Lacking that authority, whingeing about legitimacy is just that: whingeing.
In light of which, worth noting that Holyrood elections are on a five year cycle: the next election is due 7th May 2026. Holyrood can hold an election earlier, but it requires a 2/3rds majority. The SNP are comfortably large enough to block the other parties, therefore. But it’s theoretically possible for Yousaf to call one.
So - ~78k ballots issued, of which ~55k were cast.
I can see why they were a bit embarrassed to be discussing membership numbers. But no doubt everyone else’s Scottish numbers aren’t up to much either.
There are many Labour voters who would suggest that no correction was needed!
Wow. Who would’ve guessed, as recently as a decade ago, that there would now be a Yousaf in charge in Edinburgh and a Sunak in charge in London?
NPR had a story this morning about the Scottish leadership change, and the host noted the Hindu in Westminster and the Muslim in Holyrood, and asked the reporter if Yousaf’s religion or ethnicity had occasioned any comment; he said no, that South Asians in leadership positions weren’t really an unfamiliar novelty in the UK, any longer.
Not to mention the Khan in charge of London.
Also the Varadkar in Ireland.
The mainstream response is accepting to the point of being blasé but you don’t have to scratch very far below the surface of social media to find people who have a problem - yes, a fringe, but Khan has a bodyguard everywhere he goes because of the number of death threats he gets (which far exceed the normal lizardman quotient for the average mayor). Similarly there have been some fairly snide remarks about Yousaf’s faith, along the lines of “Oh, sure, you think Forbes is bad but you’re happy with one of them, are you?”.
(What is actually interesting here is that to have two candidates who are devout, practicing monotheists is actually kind of unusual in the UK - Sturgeon and Salmond certainly didn’t visibly “do God”. For a country with a rich tradition of political theology it’s surprising that this is surprising.)
In other news, Yousaf is busy putting his Cabinet together and has got off to a flying start.
His first appointment was Deputy First Minister* for whom he picked Shona Robison - an old friend of Sturgeon’s, a former Health Secretary (widely held to have resigned before she had to be fired) and former Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice, in which role she steered the GRR through Holyrood.
So far, so continuity.
But the big question was always going to be what role Yousaf would offer Forbes. Had he won comfortably, he’d be in a position to do without her. But as she has the preference of 48% of the party, it seemed he would have to give her a reasonably meaty role. He had, after all, made a speech about unifying the party and not being Team Humza or Team Kate any more. More to the point, keeping in the Cabinet makes her jointly responsible for government decisions, thus shutting down her ability to criticise. However, what role he would offer was an open question. She was Finance Secretary after all - that’s very senior. If he didn’t want her there, it would have to be something equally hefty. However, given her social conservatism, putting her in a role which touched in any way on LGBTQ+ or family issues would be pretty controversial. So which way did he jump?
He fired her.
Specifically, he offered her Rural Affairs - a demotion which would make her work closely with the Greens, the progressives who don’t see eye to eye with her on either social issues or the primacy of profit. In other words, “fuck off”. Forbes gave a very gracious comment saying she would be happy to serve with the back benches. Unofficially:
So now he has a rival with major party backing unbound by Cabinet responsibility sitting on the back benches. Better yet, he pulled the same trick with one of her close supporters, the Minister for Business, Trade, Tourism and Enterprise, who has also returned to the backbenches. So it’s not an accident.
Deputy First Minister can’t be that tough a job, because Shona Robison is now also Finance Secretary.
We wait to see how the rest of the reshuffle shapes up - he certainly has promises to keep on his side and being completely untroubled by any need for a show of unity will at least ensure there are enough empty seats to let him fulfill them.
*Yes, this should obviously be Second Minister
Some interesting detail on the history of this here:
The role of the Commonwealth is particularly interesting, as is the credit that goes to Cameron for modernising the Tory party (a job that is still not finished, but they changed a lot relatively quickly under him).
My bad, but who’s the guy on the left?
Of course it’s also notable that 3 of the 4 ‘Great Offices of State’ in the UK Government are held by ethnic minorities.
Only if we can have a “Subprime Minister” in London. For a while back in 2007/8, it looked like we might need one!
Anas Sarwar, Scottish Labour Leader. Not a household name in the UK.
Is there any chance for a party split? I don’t see any inherent reason there couldn’t be two pro-independence parties. And with party membership so low, the barrier to creating a new one would seem low.
The equivalent at Westminster is Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. Or Scotland.
We’ve already got a Cabinet-ful of them!
Full Cabinet is announced. A mix of old-stagers and new talent.
Robertson, Somerville and Matheson in particular have been doing this a while, along with Robison - these appointments do leave Yousaf open to the “more of the same is mediocrity” challenge levelled by Forbes. The three new names balance that out somewhat.
The responsibilities are more interesting - we have a Minister for Net Zero and Just Transition as well as a Minister for Wellbeing Economy, Fair Work and Energy, which seems like an overlap. Just Transition, btw, is code for “what do you mean we can’t go green and still have a massive oil industry full of high wage jobs?” and is really quite politically sensitive. That we also have an Energy Minister alongside that feels…a little unco-ordinated?
There’s already been one - Alex Salmond (Sturgeon’s predecessor), picked up his ball and set up Alba a little while ago.