Channel 4 News published April 29, 2024: Humza Yousaf resigns as Scotland first minister - what next for SNP?
It was a self-inflicted downfall - and Humza Yousaf admitted that himself. He miscalculated - hoping for a friendly divorce with the Greens but making it a bitter one.
Sky News Australia published April 29, 2024: ‘Good riddance’: Savage reaction to Humza Yousaf’s resignation.
Scottish residents have a brutal message for the ‘woke’ outgoing First Minister, Humza Yousaf.
Mr Yousaf resigned on Monday just days after abruptly ending a power-sharing agreement with the Greens.
A local resident told GB News Mr Yousaf’s resignation was “brilliant news” while expressing his concerns over Scotland’s new hate crime law.
People around the world have taken to social media to express their views on his resignation.
“Good News! Hope they elect someone better,” one user posted on X.
"Good riddance," another wrote.
Humza Yousaf will continue as First Minister until a successor has been elected.
GBNews published April 14, 2024: Scottish hate crime law | Pensioner emotionally recalls ARREST over Humza Yousaf's bill. ‘If I didn’t come they were going to handcuff me…’ Pensioner Morag McDougall Brown emotionally recalls her arrest after allegations she had broken Scotland’s new hate crime law.
GBNews published March 31, 2024: 'ABSURD!': Scotland's new hate crime law will cause 'more HATE and more division!'
'It's absolutely absurd.' Former MSP and MEP, Brian Monteith, expresses concern over Scotland's new hate crime law and believes it will cause 'more hate, and more division in society.'
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The Telegraph, UK
written by Gordon Rayner, Associate Editor
Monday April 29, 2024
Humza Yousaf described himself as “the luckiest man in the world” when he was elected as the 14th leader of the SNP and, in consequence, the sixth First Minister of Scotland.
Less than 400 days later, Mr Yousaf has accepted the brutal truth: that he inherited a crown too heavy for his head, and one irreversibly tainted by the legacy of what went before.
Where his predecessors Nicola Sturgeon and Alex Salmond will be remembered long after their lifetimes, for good or ill, Mr Yousaf, like his Westminster equivalent Liz Truss, is destined to become nothing more than a trivia question.
Only the very strongest of leaders could have overcome the twin horrors of Ms Sturgeon’s toxic deal with the Greens and the police investigation into the SNP’s finances, and Mr Yousaf was never that.
Having talked up his plans to reform the Scottish NHS, ease the cost of living crisis and improve rural housing when he was elected, Mr Yousaf will instead be remembered, briefly, as the man who turned the Orwellian nightmare of thoughtcrimes to reality through his Hate Crime and Public Order Act.
By empowering trans ideologists to report anyone who disagreed with them to the police – with a promise that every complaint would be investigated – Mr Yousaf ensured his complete alienation from voters who wanted their police to solve burglaries and their politicians to focus on Scotland’s appalling record on health, education and drug addiction.
In truth, the public never wanted Mr Yousaf as First Minister: opinion polls before his election consistently showed that Kate Forbes, his socially conservative rival for the leadership, was far more popular with both SNP supporters and voters as a whole.
But he won the backing of SNP members by portraying himself as the Sturgeon continuity candidate, unaware that her legacy was about to turn to ashes thanks to the criminal investigation into SNP finances, which so memorably included questions about a motorhome, and which continue to this day.
What he did know, though, was that Ms Sturgeon’s confidence and supply deal with the Green Party, cooked up after she fell one seat short of a working majority, was storing up trouble for the future.
Some of his own MSPs warned him that the Greens were “extremists” whose policies on net zero and trans rights would spell ruin for the SNP, and that he should terminate the deal and govern as a minority leader.
Stephen Flynn, the SNP’s Westminster leader, appeared to be speaking for a different party when he opposed Labour’s windfall tax on oil and gas at the same time as Mr Yousaf was committed to the Greens’ target of a 75 per cent reduction in carbon emissions by 2030 compared with 1990. The pragmatic Mr Flynn was sending a clear message to Mr Yousaf that the ideology of net zero would cost the SNP support in constituencies reliant on petrochemical jobs, and that the deal with the Greens had outlived its usefulness.
Yousaf accused of blowing in the wind
Instead, in one of the greatest miscalculations in recent political history, Mr Yousaf lashed himself to the Greens like a helmsman in a storm, saying the deal was “worth its weight in gold”.
Nor did he try to distance himself from the Sturgeon agenda, despite advice to the contrary, which his critics interpreted as evidence that he had no agenda of his own.
He was accused of blowing with the wind by using the language of the Left while introducing Right-wing policies like a freeze on council tax, and with Scottish independence becoming more and more of a side issue in Holyrood, Mr Yousaf’s detractors questioned what the point of him was.
Having been saved from himself by Westminster when the UK Government blocked his plans to introduce self-identification for people wanting to change sex, Mr Yousaf could not be stopped from bringing in the hate crime law he had championed as justice minister, which tied up police resources investigating whether JK Rowling was a criminal and whether or not to record non-crime hate incidents when anyone opined that men could not be women.
Mr Yousaf can at least console himself with the fact that he is not the shortest-serving First Minister in the 25-year history of the job: that honour goes to Henry McLeish, the Labour MSP who managed just one year and 12 days from 2000-2001 after taking over from Donald Dewar, who died in office in 2000.
Mr McLeish resigned after it emerged he had sub-let part of his tax-subsidised office without declaring it, and has largely been forgotten. It is a fate that Mr Yousaf must now realise awaits him too.
