Richard Walker: SNP turmoil is not evidence of an inability to rule

If you listen to pro-Union commentators, Scotland is – uniquely among the world’s democracies – unable to deal with political disagreements and machinations.

The resignation of Humza Yousaf and the events which have unravelled since are being held up as evidence that Scotland can’t run its own affairs.

This is arrant nonsense. The scrapping of the Bute House Agreement has been a s***show.

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Even if the deal between the SNP and the Greens had to be scrapped – and I’ve yet to be convinced that was the case – it’s hard to imagine that the uncoupling itself could have been handled in a manner more likely to end in disaster.

But, as far as s***shows go, it was hardly unprecedented. The truth is that politics is brutal. It is built around disagreement.

How could it be otherwise?

Political parties exist to pursue their own agenda and to argue against the agendas of their opponents.

It is the very definition of divisive and that’s no bad thing. Without division, there will be no change.

Even within those parties themselves, there are bitter disagreements. There are ideological arguments which are decided by the majority.

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There are rival factions and those who disagree with decisions either leave or suck it up.

Those who seek power will seek to unseat those who hold it.

This is the way of the political world and it can be no other way.

To listen to the post-Humza hullaballoo you would think that Holyrood is incapable of dealing with disagreement while every other parliament in the world sails through the democratic process with nary a scratch.

The narrative – the tedious, never-ending, and all-encompassing narrative – is that all this turmoil in the Scottish Parliament is a foretaste of the chaos which would envelop us were we to vote for independence.

This is a lie.

Inside Holyrood, Scottish Parliament 

For some reason, only in Scotland would it ever gain traction in the media. The truth is that you don’t have to look far to find parliaments mired in more chaos than Holyrood could ever muster. Examples are literally everywhere.

Let’s start closest to home.

Westminster has delivered a masterclass in how not to do politics for decades, but most recently since that fateful day David Cameron announced the vote on Brexit.

His fatal miscalculation that England would not be stupid enough to vote to leave Europe makes Yousaf look like the greatest political strategist of the century.

It cost him his job but much more importantly it has cost the UK billions. And it has heralded almost unprecedented chaos as a line of untalented nonentities queued up to take his place.

Each one has been worse than the last.

Theresa May? Hopeless. She quickly called a General Election, which resulted in a hung parliament and forced her into a “confidence and supply arrangement” with the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland.

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Boris Johnson? A disaster. The economic results of such an incompetent hand on the tiller were almost overshadowed by the arrogance and hypocrisy of the Covid parties which led to his downfall and one of the most bitter and paranoid resignation speeches in history.

The contrast with Yousaf’s dignified and statesmanlike farewell could hardly be more stark.

Liz Truss? Alongside her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, she announced £45 billion in unfunded tax cuts which brought the British economy to its knees.

Those who suffered were not just politicians booted out of highly-paid jobs but every man, woman and child in the UK who are still struggling to pay their bills as a direct result of Truss’s incompetence.

Rishi Sunak? The voters will soon get a chance to record their own opinion in a General Election set to record a historically huge defeat.

Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister of the UK

Things are so bad that the UK is set to return a Labour government whose main policies are almost indistinguishable from those of the government it will replace.

And let’s look at the events which are serving as a backdrop to Unionist sniping while Scotland looks for the exit door.

Refugees across the UK – including in Scotland – are being rounded up and detained before being sent to Rwanda in a resettlement scheme ruled as unlawful by the Supreme Court.

Britain is refusing to stop selling arms to Israel as the death toll in Gaza rises inexorably.

As I write, headlines tell of the killing of Palestinian children by Israeli gunmen and tell of fears that Palestinians were buried alive around the Nasser Hospital.

And we’re supposed to believe the situation is so bad in Scotland that we need to roll back the powers of devolution and that Scotland must never be a nation again.

It beggars belief.

Let’s look further afield. In America, there is a serious risk that voters could return Donald Trump to the White House. Things don’t get much bleaker than that.

In Germany, a shaky three-party coalition is facing a €17bn budget gap. In France, a minority government is surviving on a vote-by-vote basis.

Spain has been locked in a crisis as its prime minister considered resignation over corruption claims levelled at his wife. In the event, he decided to stay and fight.

In Italy – hardly a stranger to political scandals – newspapers are full of allegations that the financial police are compiling confidential and compromising dossiers against “high-profile individuals”.

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Italy, of course, has had 69 governments since the end of the Second World War.

There has been no suggestion that any of these countries have shown themselves to be so incapable of governing themselves that all the major decisions need to be taken by a neighbouring country.

Unless I have missed it, no-one has argued that the threat of Trump’s return is so crazy that America has to once more fall under British rule.

Yet a recent article by Sam Bidwell in The Critic magazine argues that devolution had been a “disaster” and that “SNP incompetence is a feature of the system and not a bug” because such philosophical titans as JK Rowling and Elon Musk don’t like the Scottish Government’s hate crime laws.

Columnists and Union supporters froth at the mouth over the destruction of devolution.

Even before the current crisis, Union supporters Scotland Matters urged political parties to include a commitment to abolish devolved powers in manifestos for the upcoming general election.

Andrew Neil has declared independence “dead for a generation”. Others have volunteered to arrange the funeral.

Let’s look clearly and rationally at what has happened in the past week in Scotland. Yousaf ended the Bute House Agreement with the Greens in a way guaranteed to cause the most anger and resentment possible.

To say he was badly advised is an understatement. The Greens were consumed by – surprise, surprise – anger and resentment, and shut the door on any arrangement, no matter how loose, which would keep the First Minister in power.

That too was a mistake.

There is no guarantee that whoever will follow him would be more supportive of Green policies and a mountain of evidence that they could very well be a great deal less supportive.

It’s also true that should the SNP minority government fall, its successor is less likely to be a pal of the Greens. So no matter how justified the anger of Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater might have been, their petulance has not advanced their cause.

Lorna Slater (left) and Patrick Harvie (Right) co-leaders of the Scottish Greens 

The failure of Labour’s no-confidence motion means that the SNP government is safe, albeit temporarily. This is the stuff of normal politics.

For independence supporters it is not particularly helpful but not quite yet a disaster.

Attention has now turned to the choice of Yousaf’s successor. Again, this is part of the normal democratic process and certainly not evidence of a Scottish inability to “do” politics.

As an independence supporter, I certainly believe that choice contains at least one possible disaster, and, like everyone else in the party, I’ll decide whether to leave or remain when that choice is made.

Whatever the outcome I’ll continue to support independence and do everything I can to make sure Scotland has some way of achieving it.

Meanwhile, I’ll trust SNP members to make the right choice and bless the day they rejected a candidate willing to vote with pro-Union parties to bring down an independence-supporting Scottish Government.