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.
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Where Scots are concerned, it seems that for every Bannockburn, there’s a Darien Venture; or a Culloden; or Scotland Vs Peru 1978; or Scotland Vs Iran 1978; or Scotland Vs Costa Rica 1990; or the Gender Recognition Bill 2023. Continuous electoral success that was only momentarily derailed by the brief Tory resurgence spearheaded by Ruth Davidson in 2017 suggested Nicola Sturgeon’s lengthy tenure as SNP leader and First Minister of Scotland was destined to climax with her being crowned queen of an independent Scotland come the next ‘once in a generation’ referendum. And now it’s all over. Wee Nicola has announced she will be bringing the curtain down on her stellar political career without having seen through the fanatical obsession of every committed Scottish Nationalist to its ultimate conclusion, one that appears to take precedence over every other issue that elected leaders of countries are supposed to devote their time and energy to.
Back in the days when a man could get away with observations of a lady’s physical assets by uttering such statements as ‘You don’t get many of them to the pound’, the name of Raquel Welch routinely cropped-up as an example of a female public figure renowned for being…erm…well-endowed. Yes, Dolly Parton may have eventually superseded Ms Welch as the most prominent example, but for the latter half of the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s, Raquel Welch was celebrated as the prime copyright-holder of the attributes many men value in the opposite sex. I suppose her memorable appearance in Hammer’s ‘One Million Years B.C.’, the historically-inaccurate yet undeniably enjoyable 1966 outing for Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion dinosaurs, sealed her reputation. The fur ‘bikini’ she wore for the duration of the movie as a prehistoric pin-up girl became one of the decade’s most iconic sartorial statements and a pop cultural snapshot that opened doors for the actress whilst simultaneously leading her down some fairly limiting and narrow alleyways.
Think about it for a moment: when the Leader of the Opposition can’t even define what a woman is, we have to accept we’re somewhere we haven’t been before. A war, by contrast, seems disturbingly familiar, something as regular as night following day; an instinctive revulsion towards conflict is as old and deep-rooted as conflict itself, so our collective response to it is a relatively universal one. Yet to have a prominent political figure with ambitions to be Prime Minister incapable of publicly admitting that men don’t have cervixes and don’t menstruate is the kind of development to which we have no prepared reaction on account of few anticipating we would get to this plateau of preposterousness. Even those of us who picked up on the genesis of the unhinged religion that is Identity Politics long before it seized control parodied it in the assumption a spoof would never be out-spoofed by real life. However, numerous satirical shorts of my own, produced back in the distant days of the 2010s – when we hadn’t quite scaled what Rod Liddle has referred to as ‘Peak Wank’ – are routinely discovered by newcomers to my YT channel, shocked and amazed that videos up to four or five years old can seem so relevant to the here and now.
You can’t keep a bad man down, eh? I should imagine Nicola Sturgeon is probably thinking that today as she continues to feel the breath of her predecessor on the back of her neck, much the same as that breath quite possibly graced a few lady necks during Alex Salmond’s stint at First Minister – allegedly, of course. It’s a been a testing week for the incumbent First Minister, even though she appears – on the surface, at least – to have come through it largely unscathed. What the week’s events have done for the long-term reputation of both her and her party is in the hands of the Scottish electorate; but she remains Nicola, Queen of Scots for the time being and gives every impression of staying put till the bitter end. As a result of recent unedifying revelations, one would like to think some Scots voters have belatedly had their eyes opened to the seedy shower of crooks and charlatans that has mismanaged their nation for far too long. But there’s a certain incurable MAGA-like passion for the SNP in certain quarters of their supporters, willing to back a staggeringly draconian – not to say Orwellian – Hate Crime bill, one that effectively outlaws criticising anyone in either public or private, whilst simultaneously feeling free to demonise the English at will because it’s such a canny smokescreen when it comes to the SNP mantra.
In the end, even the architect can be unceremoniously ejected from the building he designed. Following his resignation as manager of Liverpool FC in 1974, the legendary Bill Shankly’s fifteen years at Anfield weren’t enough to prevent him being politely asked to stay away from the club’s training ground when he had a habit of turning up unannounced and interfering in the running of the team by his successor (and former No.2) Bob Paisley. It was a sad postscript to a glittering career, but was at least handled with a degree of delicacy by the club. If I didn’t think they’d probably consider the comparison flattering, I’d more likely be talking of Trotsky and Stalin rather than Shankly and Paisley when turning the spotlight on the power struggle between Scotland’s two principal politicians of the past 20 years, Master Salmond and Madam Sturgeon. The former First Minister – and a man who did arguably more than any other single individual to further the cause of self-determination north of the border – may have avoided an ice-pick to the skull, but there are far more effective means of assassination in the age of cancel culture, where a smear or allegation are enough to leave a reputation in tatters.
Long-term loyalty to a brand can blind the customer to its faults because the customer doesn’t see it for what it is now but what it used to be then. It’s like a favourite band whose albums have got progressively worse, but you still buy them because you own all the others – or when it belatedly hits you that the TV series you’ve been watching most of your life is actually bloody terrible and you only stick with it because it’s part of the furniture; were it a new show, you’d recoil from it, so why are you still watching – just because it used to be great? Well, yeah. That happened to me with ‘Coronation Street’ a few years ago, and if I ever catch a snatch of it now it looks like every bad Aussie soap ever made rolled into one – and ‘Hollyoaks’. Likewise, when the mainstream media ceases to be the go-to source when you want to know what’s happening out there, coming back to it after an absence will probably vindicate your decision to abandon it. I wouldn’t know that personally, however, on account of not having gone back.
There’s been a distinct upsurge of activity this past week that has made even the most casual of observers aware it really is that time again – that time when honourable members suddenly cease to treat the electorate with contempt and want to be our friends. After two years of not merely reneging on promises but actively ensuring the major promise made in 2017 was discredited and discarded, there is an abrupt about-turn. For many who were happy to see out another three years tormenting and torturing a castrated administration in the insularity of the Westminster bubble without the need to attend to any actual business, a General Election was what they most dreaded; some reacted by jumping ship; those that remained onboard now have no choice but to submit to the firing squad and hope the bullets miss.
Once politicians cease to be politicians, it’s interesting how they belatedly come across as human beings; flicking between BBC and ITV coverage on Thursday night, I found the Saint & Greavsie double-act of George Osborne and Ed Balls on the latter quite entertaining and almost forgot why both provoked such loathing in me when they were in power. Perhaps there is a human being lurking somewhere in Theresa May and we won’t see it until she’s out of office; I would imagine most right now are thinking that day can’t come quick enough.
The aim of Sinn Fein is to achieve a united Ireland; the aim of the Scottish National Party is to achieve an independent Scotland; therein lies the basic raison d’être of both political parties. Neither has managed to achieve either aim yet, though the SNP has come closest. The result of 2014’s Independence Referendum, rejecting the SNP’s ‘Braveheart’ fantasy, may have cost Alex Salmond his job, but it was never going to be the end of the story with Nationalists ruling the Holyrood roost. The Brexit vote was the dream result for Nicola Sturgeon, and this week’s announcement by the First Minister that she intends to instigate a rerun of 2014 has been expected ever since the morning of June 24 last year.
Ooh, it’s hard – it’s really hard! Yes, porn-speak infiltrates political discourse and, guess what, the SNP, Sinn Fein and the Lib Dems aren’t happy. Finally, the PM emerges from her Downing Street bunker and outlines her Brexit strategy. It’s only taken Theresa May the best part of six months to come up with some sort of speech to get the classes chattering at Westminster, Holyrood and Stormont, but she’s done it at last.
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