“drift, dither and confusion”

Humza Yousaf resigned as Scottish National Party leader and Scotland’s first minister on Monday, days after unilaterally terminating his government’s coalition agreement with the Greens, says The Telegraph. With the UK general election looming, his “ostensible motivation” for severing the link with the Greens was to take charge of Scotland’s political agenda, which has been “consumed by arguments over gender identity and climate-change targets” and focus instead on issues of more immediate concern to voters. His plan was to continue in office at the head of a minority government (the SNP has 63 Holyrood seats, just short of the 65 needed for a majority), but rely on the Greens for support. He failed to anticipate the Greens’ fury, which led them to join with other opposition parties to support a no-confidence motion in his leadership. As one observer put it, in an attempt to get on the front foot, he shot himself in it.

Yousaf, who lacked the “heft of gravitas” of Alex Salmond or Nicola Sturgeon, has “played his cards ineptly, but they were not good cards to begin with”, says Alex Massie in The Times. The SNP’s popularity began to slide in the last months of Sturgeon’s leadership. He was also “hobbled” by her decision to create a coalition government with the Greens. Although it flattered Sturgeon’s idea of herself as a champion of “progressive” politics, “symbolism trumped delivery”. Good intentions, such as cutting carbon emissions by 75% by 2030, were “substituted for good outcomes”. Meanwhile, Scotland’s public services are crumbling. One in every six Scots is on an NHS waiting list; Scottish children’s test scores in the recent Pisa report were “the worst ever recorded”. Yousaf has failed to grasp these realities and paid the price for 13 months of “drift, dither and confusion”.

Instead, the coalition with the Greens helped Yousaf turn Scotland into a “laboratory for the nuttiest policies in the world”, says Fraser Nelson in The Telegraph. Mistakes have included free bus travel for under-22s, which led to aggressive child gangs “running amok” on public transport, and “fresh disasters” such as the introduction of rent controls, whi