The team around Humza Yousaf obviously felt they’d pulled off a masterstroke yesterday by quietly changing the definition of victory for whatever-they-think-they’re-seeking-a-mandate-for-at-the-general-election (“we’ve narrowed it down to two!”). Now they’ll claim to have won if they come out of the election with most seats, with no requirement for an absolute majority of the popular vote. The radical end of the independence movement is furious with the SNP for re-embracing independence as primarily a way of saving seats at Westminster, but to the extent that’s what’s going on, it doesn’t actually bug me. As I’ve said many times, although independence will probably only happen after Yousaf is replaced as leader, there needs to be something left for his successor to inherit. The situation may not be recoverable if, hypothetically, Kate Forbes were to take over after the general election with the SNP having just been reduced to six, or to two, Westminster seats. So the self-interest of the careerists at Westminster and the interests of the independence cause do actually overlap to some degree, at least in this particular scenario.
However, what does not overlap is the self-interest of those MPs and Yousaf’s own self-interest as leader, because the evidence continues to grow that his personal unpopularity is leading us all onto the rocks. The latest straw in the wind is the Scottish subsample from the newest GB-wide YouGov poll, which shows the SNP slipping into second place: Labour 37%, SNP 32%, Conservatives 11%, Greens 10%, Liberal Democrats 5%, Reform UK 1%. YouGov’s subsamples are of more interest than those from other firms because they seem to be correctly structured and weighted, meaning the only problem is the small sample size – which admittedly is still more than enough to produce highly misleading individual results. So we’ll have to wait to see whether this new result is a red herring or not, but it coincides with an Opinium poll showing the SNP slipping to an unusually low 2% of the GB-wide vote.
It’s all very well shifting the goalposts to make “victory” easier, but if you then end up falling short of your new much lower target for a win, you’re going to have egg all over your face. Once again, I can only urge SNP parliamentarians and members to face up to the problem of the Yousaf leadership before it’s too late. If it’s a straight choice between a little pain now in the shape of a second leadership election, and a lot of pain later in the shape of a crushing general election defeat, the decision ought to be a no-brainer. Unfortunately, though, Team Humza are using the incident with the heckler yesterday (which won’t have impressed the public in the slightest) to try to shore up their guy’s position within the party by weaving a mythology that he is some sort of Gandhi figure. I thought the way he handled the situation was interesting, and it certainly contrasted sharply with the approach to hecklers taken by Tony Blair – who tended to whip up Labour conferences into a state of righteous outrage by booming “go on, sir, make your protest, but just thank GOD you live in a free country where protest is allowed!”, drowning out the hecklers’ words as they were speedily manhandled out of the hall by bulky security-men, thus demonstrating powerfully that this is a country in which they do not in fact have a right to protest. But perhaps the distinction between Yousaf and Blair is one without a difference, given that a BBC journalist later noted that Yousaf “helped” the heckler out of the hall – an interesting use of the word “helped” unless she actually wanted to leave. The full-on invasion of her personal space didn’t seem entirely solicited either.
