EDDIE BARNES: After a decade-long post-referendum hangover, we are now ... trends now
Why did he do it? All the drama over the past couple of weeks – from the almighty strop taken by the Scottish Greens, to Alex Salmond’s brief return to relevance, to John Swinney’s unlikely recasting as Scotland’s latest Father of the Nation – has rather obscured this question.
Why, two weeks ago, did Humza Yousaf suddenly pull the plug on his Green partners, crashing his political career in the process?
As the dust settles on an extraordinary few days in Scottish politics, it’s a question worth returning to.
The answer, I believe, tells us something important about where Scotland stands as we begin the long run-in to the 2026 Holyrood election.
It’s also, I’d suggest, a cause for optimism.
The answer to why Humza pulled the plug on his deal with the Greens tells us something important about where Scotland stands, says Eddie Barnes
Mr Yousaf wasn’t specific about his reasons when he held his fateful press conference two weeks ago.
The pact with the Greens had simply ‘run its course’, he declared. Perhaps he didn’t want to spell it out.
The truth was quite simple: with possibly just weeks to run before a general election, Mr Yousaf junked the Greens because the deal had become politically toxic for the SNP, synonymous across Scotland with broken promises (on, for example, the environment), cock-ups (on, for example, the bottle deposit scheme) and fringe cultural issues (on, for example, trans rights).
The way the SNP and the Greens were running Scotland was going to cost the SNP seats, and it needed to change.
That final sentence sounds like the ultimate statement of the bleeding obvious but, in our strange political culture in Scotland, it marks a significant break with the recent past and from the way politics has been conducted here for the ten long years since our era-defining referendum.
Let Professor Sir John Curtice, the great polling guru, explain.
‘The thing I’ve picked up,’ Sir John said at the weekend, ‘is that whereas as recently as 2022, people’s willingness to vote for the SNP was unrelated to their attitudes to the state of the health service and so on, now they are.
Therefore the insulation of the constitutional question that has been around them for a long time, and indeed has become thicker and thicker over time, has been punctured.’
In short, the 2014 referendum changed our political culture.
It saw people identify as either Yes people or No people. The SNP benefited as the party of Yes, a position that hardened even further after the Brexit referendum.
As Sir John notes, the SNP discovered it was therefore insulated from the usual wear and tear that afflicts political parties in office, when the trains stop running on time or when the health service stops working.
This insulation meant that, in 2021, Nicola Sturgeon
could bring the Greens into government without needing to worry too much about whether they’d be any good at governing. Here was our Yes government in action.
What has changed, however, is that the umbilical link that connected pro-independence voters to the SNP and the Greens has weakened.
Many of these people have had enough of the way the SNP (and the Greens) have been running the country.
In focus groups, what used to be ‘our’ Scottish Government is now viewed, one UK Government source tells me, in the same negative
