Humza Yousaf: can new SNP leader keep Starmer out in Scotland?

The newly elected leader of the Scottish National Party faces a huge challenge to reunite his party and see off the growing threat posed by Labour north of the border.

Humza Yousaf narrowly beat Kate Forbes in the race to replace Nicola Sturgeon, following a bitter contest that revealed not only a party in disarray but also divisions within the wider independence movement.

But “while the ‘SNP establishment’ will be cheering the result and breathing huge sighs of relief”, said The Express’s political editor David Maddox, the Labour Party “is the real winner” .

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What did the papers say?

Former health secretary Yousaf secured victory as a continuity candidate who ran on his record in government. But that now presents a problem for his party, which has been in power in Scotland since 2007 and is already facing sliding poll numbers amid growing anger over worsening public services.

Scottish Labour peer George Foulkes told the Daily Mail that while Yousaf “will no doubt try and distance himself from Nicola Sturgeon’s failures”, the new boss “will have to answer for the SNP’s record at the election”.

“It is a very good result for Labour,” said former minister Foulkes, who added that the opposition had got “a lot of good ammunition” to use against Yousaf “from his own comrades”.

Pro-independence columnist Neil Mackay of Glasgow-based paper The Herald told Politico that Sturgeon had “clearly allowed all this toxin to fester, and now all the pus has burst all over the body politic of Scotland”.

Despite having been tipped for greatness and promoted by Sturgeon and her predecessor, Alex Salmond, the new first minister “has been a catastrophe in every ministerial job he has held”, said Maddox in The Express. From driving without insurance while he was transport minister and calling Scotland “too white” during his time as justice secretary, to overseeing a spike in drug-related deaths while heading the health department, Yousaf “embodies the ongoing failures of the SNP government in Scotland over 16 long years”.

But these failures “are finally catching up with them”, Maddox added.

Labour is being “inundated with applications from prospective candidates”, said the i news site’s Alan Roden. “Not so long ago it struggled to find people willing to stand.”

“The calculation for Labour is simple,” said The Times’s Steven Swinford. During Yousaf’s tenure as health secretary, NHS waiting lists in Scotland “soared to record levels”, a failure that the opposition “plans to weaponise before the next general election”. Labour SMPs believe Yousaf’s arrival as first minister will allow them “to ram home criticism of the SNP’s domestic record on health and crime”, according to Swinford.

The Telegraph’s Alan Cochrane also said that Yousaf is viewed by Labour as “easily the weakest of the candidates”.

But that does not necessarily mean the SNP will be easier to defeat at the next election, polling guru John Curtice warned. Curtice told the Financial Times that Yousaf was better placed to reunite the party than Forbes, whose conservative views might have resulted in further internal divisions.

What next?

Attention now turns to the next general election, which is widely expected to take place next autumn.

Sturgeon’s departure represented a “huge opportunity” for Starmer, who has made several trips to Scotland in recent weeks as his party seeks to rebuild the so-called tartan wall, said The Guardian's political editor Pippa Crerer. Yousaf “also neutralises the perennial Tory attack advert that depicts the Labour leader in the SNP’s pocket, as he lacks the profile of either of his predecessors”.

With Labour riding high in UK polls and comfortably in second place in Scotland, party strategists believe Starmer could pick up as many as 20 seats north of the border at the next election – possibly delivering him a working majority in Westminster while dealing a near-fatal blow to the SNP’s momentum.

But looking longer term, Curtice told the FT that nationalism in Scotland was “utterly structural – think Northern Ireland”. And some 90% of voters who favoured independence supported the SNP in the last Holyrood elections.

All the same, “SNP insiders acknowledge the threat Labour represents to them for the first time in a generation”, according to The Guardian's Crerer.

“There remain significant areas of difference – such as Brexit and migration – where they can set themselves apart,” she added. But Yousaf “does not have long to prevent his coalition of support from splintering”.