The Very Meh Humza Yousaf Thread.

[Wee-Bey]

31 minutes ago, DrewDon said:

It is also a pretty damning indictment of the party's succession planning over the last decade if the apparently best post-Sturgeon candidates they can put to the nation are Yousaf and then Swinney. 

It's almost as if Sturgeon's top down management of both the party and the wider movement whilst surrounding herself with careerist box tickers and sycophants was bad.

[Shadow Play]

I may very well be misremembering here but when Boris resigned and Truss took over was it not highlighted by all parties, including the SNP, that the public never voted for Truss and an election should be called to allow the public to decide?  The same when Sunak took office.

When Sturgeon resigned and Humza took over I don’t recall Humza highlighting this issue and he didn’t call an election.  Is it likely Humza’s replacement will call an election? 

 

[DeeTillEhDeh]

Just now, Shadow Play said:

I may very well be misremembering here but when Boris resigned and Truss took over was it not highlighted by all parties, including the SNP, that the public never voted for Truss and an election should be called to allow the public to decide?  The same when Sunak took office.

When Sturgeon resigned and Humza took over I don’t recall Humza highlighting this issue and he didn’t call an election.  Is it likely Humza’s replacement will call an election? 

 

They can't. Different rules from WM.

 

Edited April 29 by DeeTillEhDeh

[Shadow Play]

1 minute ago, DeeTillEhDeh said:

They can't.

I thought an election could be called anytime or is that just in Westminster and not the Scottish Parliament?

ETA called by the party in power.

Edited April 29 by Shadow Play

[Jim McLean's Ghost]

Humza had one moment of backbone and then collapsed.

Should have stuck it out.

[CarrbridgeSaintee]

46 minutes ago, Highlandmagar said:

And replaced by?

Labour

[HibeeJibee]

8 minutes ago, Shadow Play said:

I thought an election could be called anytime or is that just in Westminster and not the Scottish Parliament?

ETA called by the party in power.

Holyrood elections happen in May every 5 years.

MSPs can call an extra election - by 2/3 majority vote or by going 4 weeks without a FM - but unless after Nov 2025, there'd be another in May 2026.

[sparky88]

41 minutes ago, BFTD said:

We could probably do with getting the inevitable Forbes out of the way now, rather than another "safe pair of hands". We all know it's coming eventually, whether it's her or one of the Abla crew, and it'll go about as well as you'd imagine.

Folk have mentioned Humza Youseless being our Liz Truss, but he's more of an Iain Duncan-Smith or Theresa May figure - the proper lunacy is still to come.

Except Forbes will probably be brought down by social, rather than economic factors, unlike Truss. 

And that might make it a little bit more messy. 

18 minutes ago, Shadow Play said:

I may very well be misremembering here but when Boris resigned and Truss took over was it not highlighted by all parties, including the SNP, that the public never voted for Truss and an election should be called to allow the public to decide?  The same when Sunak took office.

When Sturgeon resigned and Humza took over I don’t recall Humza highlighting this issue and he didn’t call an election.  Is it likely Humza’s replacement will call an election? 

 

Yes the First Minister role is probably less powerful in relation to their party than a Prime Minister, partly due to the person in the role requiring backing from a majority of thr SP.

When Truss took over as PM for example, she just made up her own economic policy (borrowing money to pay for tax cuts for the rich) ignoring the Tory manifesto in the process. Not sure an FM would get far if they tried doing the same, which is much better democratically. 

[RawB93]

2 hours ago, Leith Green said:

I suppose its designed to prevent young vulnerable bams from turning into older and more hardened bams in places like Polmont

Exactly.

Do we really think the offender will be less of a danger to the public at, let's say 26, having served 10 years; with 5 in Polmont and 5 in Barlinnie?

The prison system has proven itself to be a failure, not to mention they're all absolutely rammed. Suicide rates are up and there's currently 7 month waiting lists in HMP Perth (for example) to see a mental health nurse.

Looking to take more constructive methods to actually rehabilitate offenders, particularly at such young ages is the right thing to do. 

[RH33]

That's a shorter wait than on the outside. Sign me in.

[ScotiaNostra]

56 minutes ago, D Angelo Barksdale said:

It's almost as if Sturgeon's top down management of both the party and the wider movement whilst surrounding herself with careerist box tickers and sycophants was bad.

its surprising just how surprising for so many the collapse of the SNP has been 

[welshbairn]

I may be entering the world of mysogeny by pointing out that the Tory deputy leader Meghan Gallagher on the Nine on BBC Scotland appears to have borrowed Groucho Marx's eyebrows.

[BucksburnDandy]

What a brutal state Sturgeon left the SNP in. Yousaf was out of his depth, albeit a genuinely decent guy when he officially opened my place of employment last year.

 

Swinney v Forbes is a fairly miserable choice. Swinney was pretty much rubbish apart from his spells in the finance brief and his first spell as leader was a dreadful time for the SNP. Forbes holds some dreadful social views, throwing away a routine win last year by airing these in public.

 

The state of politics in Scotland just now is grim. The SNP are out of ideas. The Greens are more interested in culture wars than actually being a proper green party. Alba are full of absolute moon howlers and it's sad to see what Alex Salmond has become given he was pretty comfortably the best FM to date (obviously sleepy cuddles overshadows that).

 

Then on the Unionist side, the Tories are their usual hopeless selves, the Lib Dems are a pressure group of shy Tories. Labour can't hold a policy position for any length of time about anything. No doubt if Keith was in number 10 and Sarwar in Bute House, we'd have government by diktat of Ian Murray on the phone from London like the good old days of Jack McConnell being the admin for Gordon Brown.

 

What a shite state of affairs 

[itzdrk]

2 hours ago, BFTD said:

We could probably do with getting the inevitable Forbes out of the way now, rather than another "safe pair of hands". We all know it's coming eventually, whether it's her or one of the Abla crew, and it'll go about as well as you'd imagine.

Folk have mentioned Humza Youseless being our Liz Truss, but he's more of an Iain Duncan-Smith or Theresa May figure - the proper lunacy is still to come.

I'm sorta with you on Forbes, I guess if it does happen it's only 18 months or so until they inevitably lose the Holyrood election.  It feels like it's going to happen one day so maybe this is the best time for it.  

[alta-pete]

25 minutes ago, welshbairn said:

I may be entering the world of mysogeny by pointing out that the Tory deputy leader Meghan Gallagher on the Nine on BBC Scotland appears to have borrowed Groucho Marx's eyebrows.

I don’t know; decent tits? 

[tamthebam]

1 minute ago, alta-pete said:

I don’t know; decent tits? 

Tories are tits but none of them are decent

[Highlandmagar]

8 hours ago, CarrbridgeSaintee said:

Labour

Hahahaha. The joke of the century!

[GHF-23]

12 hours ago, MazzyStar said:

 

Wtf

Yeah this had me wondering as well, the SNP were understood very recently as the pro-Independence centrist party. I guess the coalition with a more progressive liberal party has effected that but I still wonder what people mean when they want the SNP to be more centrist. They still very much are!

They accept the economic orthodoxy of austerity as default, they are fairly anti-democratic at both a local and national level, internally and externally. They accept that they have no power to meaningfully overhaul social or economic iniquities within the polity and instead fiddle at the margins based on what some well-meaning but short-sighted academics, pressure groups or party interests think is a good idea and which they think will be popular, wasting quite a lot of money in the process.

The things which differentiate them from say the New Labour government is there is no overflow from growth which can allow for a better standard of public services, and to their credit an unwillingness to phone up the Sunday Times whenever the polls are looking bad and say they want to tag asylum seekers or mandate shops having those high pitched noise things to stop teenagers hanging about. They are of course small time authoritarians in other ways as we saw with COVID or the increasingly pathetic lifestyle choices bans and taxes. 

This is what centrism is, and it will continue as we go through this potentially very long period of reduced growth and an end to cheap abundance as we know it up to and past the point that you look out the window (of your poorly made and ruinously expensive house that you can't do anything about because regulation was slashed to encourage house builders) and notice the road is now one big pothole, the library is only open 1 day a week, the high tech self-driving ambulances we outsourced keep crashing into pedestrians and isn't it strange that all the asylum seekers and homeless people just disappeared. That's if the country doesn't realise after a term of catastro-Keir that this is where we're going and instead decide to jump off in favour of the reconstituted ultra-reactionary Conservative and Reform Party.

[VictorOnopko]

9 hours ago, welshbairn said:

I may be entering the world of mysogeny by pointing out that the Tory deputy leader Meghan Gallagher on the Nine on BBC Scotland appears to have borrowed Groucho Marx's eyebrows.

It'd be on trend with her party at Westminster under Rishi T. Firefly (it's just a shame so many of the Mrs Teasdales they've taken money from have been Russians):

The last man nearly ruined this place,
He didn't know what to do with it.
If you think this country's bad off now,
Just wait 'till I get through with it.

[vikingTON]

12 hours ago, Granny Danger said:

Homophobia “not particularly consequential”?  

I'm sure that there have been plenty of 'homophobes' in the SNP membership and indeed among some elected politicians too. Not to mention the decades of frothing about the Souter's views as major financial backers of the party and the cause of Scottish independence. As there would be in almost every party - because Scotland is a far more socially conservative society beneath the veneer of middle class inclusivity. 

None of that has stopped political and state recognition of homosexuality being firmly established under the Scottish Parliament and 17 years of SNP government. So yes, their views* are in fact not particularly consequential to the politics of the time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

* And not all opposition to a policy like same-sex marriage is based on 'homophobia' either. 

Edited April 30 by vikingTON