It’s not often a headline provokes a spontaneous ‘Oh, no!’ from yours truly, but I have to admit when I saw Humza Yousaf had been elected the new SNP leader, it did. The man who embodies all the double-standard hypocrisy inherent in the militantly PC ‘Progressive’ Identitarian brigade, who was amongst the hardest of hardliners when it came to lockdown cheerleading, who was the driving force behind Scotland’s contentious hate crime bill intended to outlaw free speech in the privacy of one’s home, who believes all a man has to do to change sex is to proclaim himself a woman, whose authoritarian leanings Kim Jong-Un would regard as a tad extreme, whose absence of humour led him to accuse those who retweeted a video of him falling off a scooter (that made him look like a prize prat) of every ‘ism’ under the sun – this is the man chosen by his party to succeed Nicola Sturgeon as the former First Minister and her husband exit under a cloud of controversy and financial scandal? I think the last time an in-party leadership appointment sparked such a bout of head-shaking was when Comrade Corbyn was elected Labour leader; but I suppose if the promotion of Sturgeon’s Health Secretary turns out as well as that did, the Union is perhaps secure after all.
If one were to invent the ultimate right-on politician for a cartoon to appear in, say, Private Eye, chances are one wouldn’t have to delve too deep into satire were Humza Yousaf to be used as the model. The man is practically a parody of the species as it is, making Sadiq Khan look like Nigel Farage; even the Guardian and the Labour Party would probably find him a bit much; indeed, Labour’s Deputy north of the border Jackie Baillie described Yousaf as ‘the worst Health Secretary on record’ in reference to the decline and fall of Scotland’s NHS on his watch. One wonders if Citizen Yousaf parades his Woke credentials with such pride as a canny smokescreen to mask his mediocre performance in office. The SNP’s Kate Forbes, one of his rivals in the race to supersede Sturgeon, was even more cutting in her criticism. ‘You were Transport Minister and the trains were never on time,’ she said to him during a televised debate; ‘when you were Justice Secretary the police were stretched to breaking point, and now as Health Minister we’ve got record high waiting times.’
Quick to play the race card and leap on any barely-mobile bandwagon he thinks will signal his unimpeachable virtue, Yousaf once retweeted a video that allegedly showed Glasgow Rangers footballers engaging in a sectarian singsong; his undue haste swiftly proved to be a misjudgement when the video was exposed as a fake. Only recently, he and his wife dropped a £30,000 legal claim against a Dundee nursery they accused of ‘discrimination’ simply because the place didn’t have room for their precious daughter; the fact these claims that the nursery described as ‘demonstrably false’ have cost it tens of thousands of pounds to defend its good name evidently matter not in the noble pursuit of social justice. Yet, as is so often the case with those who wear their virtue as a T-shirt, all is not what it seems. As a noted advocate of the Stonewall brand of ‘gay rights’, Yousaf was famously absent from the decisive vote on gay marriage at Holyrood in 2014 – an absence blamed at the time by Alex Salmond on pressure from a Glasgow mosque (Yousaf is a Muslim), something Yousaf denied. And let’s not forget that six months into his stint as Transport Secretary he was fined £300 by police for driving a friend’s car without the required insurance.
But it was Citizen Yousaf’s promotion to Justice Secretary in 2018 that earned him the authoritarian spurs he wore so well during the pandemic. His flagship policy was the aforementioned Hate Crime and Public Order Act. Despite opposition from the likes of the Law Society of Scotland and the Scottish Police Federation – not to mention JK Rowling, who ran the risk of being prosecuted on dubious ‘transphobia’ charges – Yousaf promoted the bill with all the blinkered belligerence of the zealous fanatic, disingenuously selling the policy as a triumph of #BeKind bullshit over ‘intolerance’; former SNP Deputy Jim Sillars described the bill as ‘one of the most pernicious and dangerous pieces of legislation ever produced by any government in modern times in any part of the United Kingdom.’ Only during its passage through the Scottish Parliament was the bill amended to prevent the prosecution of those unintentionally promoting ‘hate’, such as libraries accidentally displaying books that should obviously be burned in the nearest public square; however, Citizen Yousaf stands by his belief that anyone uttering unacceptable comments behind their own closed doors is committing a punishable offence. If you’ve ever seen the 2002 movie set in a totalitarian future, ‘Equilibrium’ – where the lead character played by Christian Bale has to bite his lip around his children, who think nothing of ‘grassing him up’ to the authorities should he say the wrong thing in private – you’ll be more than aware such a law brings fiction one step closer to frightening fact.
His switch to Scotland’s Health Secretary neatly coincided with the arrival of Covid, and Yousaf entered into the scaremongering spirit by declaring in June 2021 that ten children under the age of 10 had been admitted to hospitals in Scotland the week before suffering from the coronavirus – a claim refuted by the officer for the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, who said the children in question were not hospitalised due to Covid and that there was no rise in the virus amongst children; Yousaf retracted his claim, but still played a key role in ensuring Scottish schoolchildren were unnecessarily masked-up for lessons, a move then spinelessly replicated south of the border simply because Boris Johnson didn’t want to get into another kerfuffle with Nicola Sturgeon. Moreover, rising waiting times for an ambulance prompted the Health Secretary to urge the public to ‘think twice’ before dialling 999, a call criticised as reckless by his opposite Tory number; the findings of Audit Scotland in the wake of this revealed there were 500 deaths in Scotland in September 2021 due to ambulance delays.
Of course, the election of Humza Yousaf as SNP leader being an in-house appointment – and Yousaf upholding all the progressive values that are so highly-prized amongst privileged politicians who don’t take the concerns of the plebs into consideration – the SNP hierarchy are naturally delighted by the succession. For them, it was a foregone conclusion; seen as Sturgeon’s ideological heir, Yousaf was the man the ‘progressive’ wing of the party wanted. It remains to be seen how his appointment will be received by the wider Scottish electorate, which – despite SNP propaganda – actually includes some who not only baulk at Yousaf’s more extreme proposals, but who don’t actually crave independence either. It should be remembered that one of the severe misjudgements that appeared to accelerate the retirement of Wee Nicola was the highly-publicised case of the violent rapist who suddenly (not to say conveniently) took a turn down the ‘self-identification’ route and proclaimed he was now a woman; courtesy of policies advocated by Humza Yousaf, this proclamation resulted in said rapist-in-drag being shipped off to a women’s prison.
Humza Yousaf’s commitment to this particular cause may win him plaudits in the upper echelons of his party and in activist circles; but out there beyond the cosy confines of the echo chamber, he may find such fanatical support for an issue that helped push his predecessor towards the door marked ‘exit’ might not assist him in his mission. That mission, lest we forget, is the same mission every SNP leader before him has been genetically modified to embark upon. But internal elections don’t always produce the right man, woman (or non-binary individual) for the job. Just ask Liz Truss.
© The Editor
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An anecdote I’ve a feeling I’ve recounted on here once before nevertheless seems apt for retelling at the moment; it came to me via my mother during her lengthy stint as a school dinner-lady. I remember her speaking of an Ofsted inspection at her place of employment, one which was telegraphed in advance to the headmaster; in preparation for this visit, he ensured all the school’s most troublesome pupils were absent for the duration, giving them a day-off in order that there wouldn’t be any disruptive incidents to affect the judgement of the inspectors as to whether the headmaster ran a tight ship or couldn’t control his kids. I’ve no doubt this is a common occurrence when so much of a school’s future fortunes hinge on the importance of a good Ofsted report, though the fact the stakes are so high – with staff members aware a school labelled ‘failing’ could provoke redundancies and leave it terminally incapable of turning things around due to the black mark against its name – means the strain can sometimes prove too much for those in the Ofsted firing line. Those like Ruth Perry, head teacher at Caversham Primary School in Reading.
The back end of the 20th century was fortunate – at least in terms of pop cultural retrospectives – that its musical produce was received by the largest audience; in the memory, therefore, events beyond the Top 40 are often soundtracked by popular song, which can happily enter into a marriage with moments from the wider world in serendipitous synchronicity. However, a febrile era whose songs have proven to be as much of their time as they have subsequently become timeless means a DIY ‘mix-tape’ intended to represent a turbulent period of the past can just as easily speak of the paranoia, instability and uncertainty of the here and now, especially when the here and now’s equivalent has no more impact on the wider world than a ringtone. So, to compile a collection of contemporary tunes reflecting the peculiarly melancholy mid-1970s in 2023 inadvertently sources a soundtrack which says as much about our today as it does all our yesterdays. And here is my track-list…
Before the name became synonymous with an earnest rock band whose ideological offspring have emasculated the genre beyond saving, U2 equated with a US spy plane of the original Cold War era. U2 went from being a mundane military term to a global buzzword in 1960 when the aircraft flown by American pilot Gary Powers was shot down in Soviet airspace during a clandestine surveillance mission. The plane was downed by a surface-to-air missile and the American authorities initially insisted the plane wasn’t a plane but was actually a weather research aircraft – perhaps a bit like those Chinese balloons spotted over the US a month or so ago. However, in one of the great propaganda coups of the period, the Russians paraded Powers (who had parachuted to safety) before the cameras and produced the aerial photographs of military bases the pilot had been dispatched to snap. An embarrassed America was forced to come clean just weeks before President Eisenhower was scheduled to meet Soviet Premier Khrushchev (a summit meeting which was cancelled as a consequence), despite rightly pointing out their tactics were hardly unique at the time – and indeed proved priceless when it came to Cuba a couple of years later; Powers was tried, found guilty of espionage and received a characteristically harsh seven-year sentence before returning home via a prisoner exchange in 1962.
For those not in the know, the BBC Singers are the UK’s sole professional chamber choir; perhaps lack of competition has enabled this ensemble to remain a revered fixture of the country’s Classical furniture for the best part of a century, but it also means people take notice when such unique BBC employees feel the brunt of their employer’s diminishing commitment to the highbrow. A couple of years ago, it was announced that the BBC Concert Orchestra would be dispatched to the wilds of the provinces as yet another token gesture in the ongoing (and increasingly tedious) operation to make the Beeb less ‘London-centric’; but this week an even more dispiriting sign of these BBC times came with the announcement that the BBC Singers are to be disbanded before the start of this year’s Proms, just a year before reaching their landmark 100th birthday; another penny-pinching body blow to the declining morale of these unsung old retainers was the announcement that salaries for members of the English BBC orchestras will be slashed by 20%.
In a way, it would’ve been a breath of fresh air to have been proven wrong, to have had all suspicions and scepticism exposed as ill-founded and to realise our elected leaders were acting out of genuine concern for the people after all. Alas, so engrained now is mistrust of the political class – and not without good reason, lest we forget – that it seems we were destined to have our worst fears confirmed once the private exchanges between those who implemented pandemic policies began seeping out into a mainstream media that slavishly toed the party line at the time. Two or three years later, the MSM has changed direction with the wind and is belatedly engaged in a sequence of double-takes, as though any of these so-called revelations are remotely surprising. In a way, it’s an amusing measure of just how remarkably dim Matt Hancock really is that he entrusted his WhatsApp messages to a Fleet Street snake like Isabel Oakeshott when she was co-authoring his pandemic diaries; true to her nature, Ms Oakeshott proceeded to pass them on to the Daily Telegraph, and now the former Health Secretary’s true thoughts during the period in which he and the Government adopted an approach to civil liberties that Oliver Cromwell would have regarded as a bit extreme are laid bare for all to see. And what an unedifying example of the contempt in which Hancock and his cohorts hold the proles they truly are. And we all thought they cared, didn’t we.
I suppose it’s only natural that a pop cultural age in which recycling is key should find more of interest in its past than its present; the annual roll-call of reissues and anniversaries of yesteryear’s landmark releases has become a Heritage Rock hallmark that exists alongside a glut of contemporary mediocrities without a sole original idea in their heads. And as these 21st century musical magpies freely beg, borrow and steal from the giants upon whose shoulders they squat, consumers are faced with a choice: do they buy into the lame imitation or invest in the original source material? The latter may have a vintage of half-a-century or more, but as the dividing lines between then and now that once used to matter so much to each generation have been whittled away by the Spotify playlist, it seems almost irrelevant that an album like Pink Floyd’s ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’ is 50 years old this week. It sounds as fresh today as it ever did. Just as the exquisite sonic quality of ‘Abbey Road’ has perhaps enabled that LP above all other Beatles releases to sound permanently fresh to every pair of ears that encounters it, the Floyd’s seminal 1973 release has an unprecedented aural clarity that effectively made it the first Compact Disc a decade before CDs hit the market.
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