Humza Yousaf should declare independence from the SNP

For me, a political story has achieved that loathsome term “cut-through” when it appears in my WhatsApp messages from people who aren’t obsessively interested in politics. So, since the arrest of SNP treasurer Colin Beattie on Tuesday morning, based purely on the number of times I have been asked “What’s Phil Mitchell done now?” – the SNP may wish to start panicking.

It is being taken as read that the Scottish National Party is currently facing its biggest crisis in decades. The evidence – and evidence is certainly the right word – is hard to avoid. There was the transforming of Nicola Sturgeon’s house into a scene from Taggart, with footage of a giant blue police tent in her unassuming Glasgow front garden, being broadcast all around the world.

Her husband, the SNP’s chief executive Peter Murrell, was arrested and subsequently released without charge pending further investigation. And now the SNP treasurer, Colin Beattie, has been dragged down to the nick for much the same reason.

What is remarkable, as is always the way in British politics, is the paucity of the sums involved. The SNP is understood to have raised £666,953 in fundraising for the cause of independence between 2017 and 2020. And yet, at the end of 2019, there was just £97,000 in its account. There are no doubt mitigating circumstances, but as it stands, the cause of Scottish independence may yet be banjaxed for less than the cost of a not especially important scene from Braveheart.

Men have fought and died for centuries in service of this noble cause. Others have filled up libraries with yearning songs and poems. And now, at this precise moment in time, its fate appears to rest on precisely how it was that a luxury campervan of uncertain origin came to be parked outside Nicola Sturgeon’s mother-in-law’s house.

And pity, naturally, poor Humza Yousaf. He is going through the motions of being first minister as best as he can, though none of it seems any more real to him than it does the rest of us. Elected as the apparent “continuity candidate”, when he wanders up to the TV cameras to answer yet another impossible question, he appears to be wondering the very same thing as the rest of us: continuity with what?

He is the continuity candidate who’s got no idea what he’s meant to be continuing with, because no one ever got round to telling him what was going on. He leads a party that, until he became its leader two weeks ago, he didn’t know had had no auditors for six months.

Naturally, he’s not been left short of advice. Alex Salmond has popped up on Newsnight to tell him that what he needs to do, apparently, is scrap various unpopular policies like the bottle return scheme, and hope that that might make things better. Yousaf has responded – perhaps coincidentally – by doing exactly that.

Salmond and various allies of his have decided that the cause of independence must now be broadened and thus, in effect, disassociated from the SNP. Independence is still popular, polling at 45 per cent; it’s just the SNP that aren’t.

He’s kind of right, but he’s also entirely wrong. When George Orwell went off to fight in the Spanish civil war he observed that nationalism is a horse that dies the moment it crosses the finish line. It might get you where you want to go, but the moment you get there it’s of no use to you whatsoever.

When Gordon Brown advocated for devolution a quarter of a century ago, he was warned, mainly by Scottish Tories, that it would ultimately only give nationalists more ammunition for their cause. For a while those warnings looked to be correct. But at this precise moment, Brown – who is currently arguing for even more devolution – has been shown to be right.

The long, boring business of government is harder than it looks, and independence might not necessarily be the answer to all of Scotland’s problems. Sturgeon, for what it’s worth, made no secret of the fact that her driving mission, apart from independence, was to close (or at least just narrow) the attainment gap between poor children and the rest.

When she stood down she said it was because she simply didn’t have enough left in her to keep going. But despite her exhaustion, and by her own admission, the gap remains as wide as ever.

It’s a relief in some ways that she got out when she did. Given she was already so very tired, imagine if she’d been having to deal with all this too. If simply having had enough is a fair enough reason to quit politics these days, no one could possibly blame Humza Yousaf if he decides another two weeks is plenty.