interspersed with my own reservations about it:
SNP’s era of public rows runs on
...
Humza Yousaf, pondering the question of what to do with former leadership candidate Kate Forbes, opted to offer her the post of rural affairs. Although the role is of strategic importance to the SNP — by bearing on the very votes for which the party is competing with the Conservatives — it isn’t a role of similar internal importance. Forbes has instead chosen to quit government and go to the backbenches.
How big of a deal is this? Well, it confirms that the SNP’s new era of open disagreement is going to run for a while longer and that Yousaf did not try particularly hard to keep Forbes in the fold.
https://www.ft.com/content/595d092a-077d-4da8-86bc-b688a8de2193
Twitter was alight last night with Forbes loyalists (and a multitude of unionist shit-stirrers) portraying Yousaf's offer of the post of Minister of Rural Affairs as a deliberate and petty attempt to "demote" her. Much dummy-spitting and some declarations of resigning from the SNP were mixed in.
The fact is that Forbes had indicated she wanted a less demanding portfolio than Finance (apart from anything else, she has a baby under one year old and broke into her maternity leave to stand in the leadership election). More significantly, portraying Rural Affairs as a relatively trivial ministry smacks of Scottish Central Belt-ism - just as UK politics is seen by many to be too London- and Southeast-centric, there's long been resentment that rural areas have seen less focus in policy debates.
This would have been a chance for Forbes to shake up that ministry and carry out some of the measures she championed during the hustings, and as a Western Isles MSP, it would have seemed right up her street given her current domestic situation. For her own reasons, she chose not to go for it and to return to the backbenches instead. She seems outwardly quite sangine about it. We'll have to wait and see if her fans eventually follow her lead.
Bush continues:
But one important thing not to do when discussing the SNP is to over-apply precedent or examples from other political parties in the UK, because the SNP is completely unlike the Conservative party, the Labour party or the Liberal Democrats.
The ideological gap between Yousaf and Forbes was incredibly large. On the one hand, you had a liberal candidate pledging to continue the centre-left approach targeted firmly on Scotland’s central belt and public sector workers, who powered its recent electoral successes. On the other, you had a social and fiscal conservative vowing to tear that approach up and to focus on the SNP’s old base of rural and affluent voters in its first breakthroughs in the 1970s and 1980s.
Bush goes on to examine the transfers of votes between the two frontrunners in the election. He spots that there were significant transfers of votes between the two at second preference level (there were a surprising number of transfers from Ash Regan to Humza Yousaf as well, but that's by the by). This chimes with my own experience. I gave Forbes my second preference. Had she won, I'd have had reservations about her becoming leader, but I'd have waited to see what she did with the role and how she set about trying to unite the party and form a government.
Bush points out that viewing the SNP through the same lens as applied to UK national parties is a mistake. The unifying theme for SNP members and voters is a quest for independence. The current stalemate with Westminster on that issue is a far greater cause of impatience and predictable infighting than any ideological differences on other issues and squabbling about the "pecking order" among the Holyrood ministries and whose career is being furthered or impeded.
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