SNP leadership race still an uncertain picture after first hustings

Good morning. Humza Yousaf, Kate Forbes and Ash Regan went head to head last night in Cumbernauld in the contest to succeed Nicola Sturgeon. Some thoughts on the shape of the SNP leadership contest in today’s note.

First fisticuffs

The SNP leadership election kicked off in earnest with its first televised hustings last night (livestream replay here). I’m not going to speculate on who “won”, because the audience for these things are the card-carrying members of the SNP, whose views are rather different to mine.

My general assumption about this leadership election is that the Scottish health secretary Humza Yousaf will hoover up votes from most of the SNP’s socially liberal, pro-Remain majority (of which a large proportion of MSPs joined the SNP in 2014 or 2016).

Meanwhile, finance secretary Kate Forbes will garner most of the votes of the SNP’s older guard. That’s based on the very little we can say we “know” about the SNP’s membership: the majority of it is in a very different place to Forbes on social issues, but a decent-sized chunk of the party’s activist base isn’t.

But there’s an awful lot I know I don’t know. Below are three questions I’m still unclear about:

How big of a deal is it that Ash Regan has the most radical approach on independence?

Regan’s resignation from the government over Scotland’s proposed gender recognition reforms meant she started with a disadvantage. That is added to the perception that Yousaf is the preferred candidate of the departing party leadership. However, Regan has one very important card to play.

She is the candidate with the most radical proposal to achieve Scottish independence: if parties supporting Scottish independence achieve 51 per cent of the vote at the next Westminster or Holyrood election, the Scottish government should immediately begin negotiations to trigger independence. While there are a number of minor flaws with this strategy, it may be that there is a big enough appetite for it within the party’s rank-and-file that she is able to pull off an unlikely win.

There is certainly a ready audience for this among the SNP membership, but absent decent polling I don’t know how large it is.

How much attention is the membership as a whole actually paying to this contest?

The SNP membership is freakishly large in modern terms. On a per capita basis, the 100,000 or so members of the SNP make the party one of the largest in Europe. What I don’t know is whether that reflects Scotland’s greater politicisation, and that these members are every bit as hyper-engaged as their equivalents in England and Wales, or if they reflect the SNP’s success in turning fairly casual supporters of the party into members.

The more casual and disengaged the party membership, the more likely it will vote with the Scottish public at large. According to the polls, Kate Forbes is currently the Scots’ preferred first minister.

How much does it matter that Humza Yousaf is visibly the top choice of the party’s leadership?

In any number of ways, small and large, party grandees have indicated that Humza Yousaf is the preferred choice of many of the SNP’s power brokers. My impression is that the party’s membership is fiercely loyal to its leaders and that the explicit and implicit steer from various bigwigs will matter a great deal.

But it’s all just an impression: the members I speak to may be wildly unrepresentative. The activist base may be in a very different place to the due-paying membership.

While everything we know about the contest still suggests it is Humza Yousaf’s contest to lose, there is an awful lot we know we don’t know.

Now try this

I’m in conversation with David Dein, the architect of the Premier League, about football, business, his new book and, of course, Arsenal Football Club at Kings Place in London this evening.

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