First of all, let me acknowledge that Chris Hanlon’s own personal reasons for considering a leadership challenge may be very different from my own reasons for believing Humza Yousaf needs to be challenged. What I’m about to say is based on the premise that it would be a good thing if Yousaf is dislodged because it could save the SNP from a defeat next year that the wider cause of independence might never recover from. From that perspective, the objective of a challenge by a relatively unknown figure like Hanlon is not to oust Yousaf in one go, but instead to weaken his position in preparation for a better opportunity later on. The only exception to that would be if a more high-profile figure uses the opening up of a leadership contest to put themselves forward as a candidate, but at the moment that seems unlikely.
It has to be said that a leadership challenge does not in itself weaken the incumbent. The total opposite can even be true if the challenger underperforms, as for example Tony Benn did against Neil Kinnock in 1988. Allowances will be made for Hanlon given his low profile, but nevertheless if he was to be defeated by, say, 95% to 5%, that would probably strengthen Yousaf’s position in the short term, especially given that Kate Forbes and her supporters would probably feel obliged to explicitly give their backing to Yousaf during the contest. Team Humza would doubtless spin it as an astounding surge in their man’s popularity in a short space of time due to people seeing him in action as First Minister. They would say he had gone from narrow victor in the spring to having the party totally united behind him in the autumn.
So that’s the potential danger, but in this case it’s outweighed by the urgency of the electoral crisis the SNP face. As I keep pointing out, Yousaf really needs to be dislodged before a general election defeat occurs, not afterwards, and time is running out if that’s going to be done. Kate Forbes, assuming she still wants the top job, appears to be biding her time until Yousaf crashes and burns at the general election, which may make perfect sense from her own personal point of view, but will be too late from the point of view of the independence cause. Others will have to take the initiative, and a ‘stalking horse’ leadership challenge may well be worth trying just to see if it’s the pebble that starts the avalanche. Even if it goes wrong and Yousaf is temporarily strengthened, that may not make much difference in the long run because an SNP defeat at the general election would swiftly undo the effect anyway. (And if the SNP somehow avoid election defeat under Yousaf, he’ll have proved us all wrong, in which case fair enough.)
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SCOT GOES POP FUNDRAISER 2023: This year’s fundraiser has now been running for well over two months, and it’s been partially successful – it’s around a quarter of the way towards its target figure of £8500. Please bear with me as I plug away at continuing to promote it at the bottom of every blogpost, because there’s very little point in leaving the job half-done – that would mean continuing with the current service for maybe two or three more months and then more or less stopping. We wouldn’t necessarily need to hit the full target figure to avoid that outcome, but substantial progress would need to be made. Why is it a bit harder to raise money these days than it used to be? Obviously it’s partly because of the cost of living crisis, but I think the bigger issue is that it’s far easier for a pro-indy blog to inspire people to donate if it’s pumping out a “purist” message that appeals to one of the two opposite ends of the spectrum – ie. either that the SNP leadership can do no wrong and deserve our unquestioning support, or that the SNP is unremittingly evil and must be totally destroyed. Scot Goes Pop has a much more nuanced analysis that is pretty much bang in the middle between those two extremes. But the glass-half-full way of looking at it is that £2000+ raised means that people still think nuance and independent thinking (alternatively known as “being in the scunnered middle”) have their place. A million thanks to everyone who has donated so far, and anyone wishing to make a donation can do so HERE. Alternatively, direct donations can be made via Paypal (in many ways this is preferable because it cuts out the middle man). My Paypal email address is: jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk
