Tipsheet

Why Scotland's Woke First Minister Resigned

Matt Vespa
Matt Vespa  |  May 11, 2024 7:00 AM

There’s been a lot of news on the home front, which allowed this news from across the pond to fall by the wayside. Biden’s unnecessarily creating tension with Israel, coupled with pro-Hamas college campus mayhem, has soaked up the news cycle, along with Trump’s Stormy Daniels trial, and a series of bad economic reports have added to the news avalanche. It all relates to the upcoming 2024 election. Still, it’s good news: Scotland’s woke first minister quit before a vote of no confidence booted him from office. 

Humza Yousaf, the nation’s first Muslim first minister, opted to throw in the towel on April 29. It comes after his government collapsed over transgender issues and problems fulfilling a greenhouse gas emission goal. It was a lofty goal to reduce such emissions by 75 percent by 2030. Two issues championed by the far left caused the Scottish National Party and the Greens to fix bayonets against one another. There’s also a brewing party funding scandal as well. Yousaf went viral with his unhinged rant about the need to increase diversity, which came off as an anti-white screed. Blessedly, he’s gone now (via NYT): 

Scotland’s first minister, Humza Yousaf, resigned … in a fresh setback for his Scottish National Party, which has been engulfed in a slow-burning crisis over a funding scandal that erupted after a popular leader, Nicola Sturgeon, stepped down last year. 

Mr. Yousaf’s departure had looked increasingly inevitable after he gambled last week by ending a power-sharing deal with the Scottish Green Party. 

The two parties had clashed over climate goals and trans rights, but his abrupt decision angered the Greens and left him at the head of a minority government without obvious allies. His opponents then pressed for two motions of no confidence, which are expected to take place later this week. 

[…] 

His resignation was the latest twist in a dramatic change in fortune for the S.N.P., which has dominated the country’s politics for more than a decade and which campaigns for Scottish independence. 

[…] 

“Looking at it in the short term, it has been a dramatic fall,” said James Mitchell, professor of public policy at Edinburgh University, “But the tide turned against them and it has been receding for quite some time. They never got out of campaign mode and they never got back to governing mode.” 

Mr. Yousaf succeeded Ms. Sturgeon, who announced her departure in February last year, and he was initially seen as a continuity candidate. That became less of an asset when Ms. Sturgeon’s husband, Peter Murrell, was arrested and later charged in connection with the embezzlement of funds while he was the party’s long-serving chief executive. Ms. Sturgeon was also arrested in the same inquiry but has not been charged. 

With the funding scandal looming over the S.N.P., Mr. Yousaf struggled to assert himself, and the crisis coincided with the dimming of prospects for a new independence referendum, the party’s main preoccupation. 

The SNP-Green power-sharing agreement was struck in 2021, but the increasing tension led the latter party to seek counsel among their members about dissolving the pact. The Times added that Yousaf preempted this by blowing up the pact. Whatever the case, the Labour Party hopes to capitalize on the SNP dysfunction. Let them handle that, but woke nonsense once again turned a government into a circus. 

Here, Democrats are facing the same problem, as the pronoun people also don’t know how to govern. There is a pause on that front, as liberals placate and suck up to antisemites and pro-Hamas supporters to avoid a political crisis for Joe Biden as he campaigns for a second term.