SNP leadership candidates clash in heated televised debate

The candidates seeking to replace Nicola Sturgeon as leader of the Scottish National party and first minister of Scotland attacked each other’s records in a heated televised debate that laid bare tensions within the party.

The hostile tone of the debate on STV on Tuesday night suggests that the SNP could struggle to restore unity in a party that has governed Scotland since 2007 and was, under Sturgeon, renowned for its discipline and unity in pursuit of its goal of independence from the UK.

In the first televised debate of the campaign, Kate Forbes, the finance secretary, launched a scathing attack on the record of health secretary Humza Yousaf, the frontrunner who has also won the backing of most of the party’s heavyweights. Forbes suggested that she would not keep him in his current position should she win.

“When you were transport minister, the trains were never on time, when you were justice minister, the police were strained to breaking point and now as health minister we’ve got record-high waiting times,” she told Hamza.

Forbes’s echoing of rival parties’ attack lines against one of Sturgeon’s longest-serving government ministers will be welcomed by opposition leaders, but could risk alienating some SNP supporters.

Sturgeon’s shock announcement last month that she would vacate a post she has held since 2014 has sparked the first leadership battle in the pro-independence party in two decades.

The contest has focused on the party’s strategy for independence after Sturgeon’s plan for a “de facto referendum” faced opposition within the SNP. As Scotland’s longest-serving first minister, Sturgeon held a tight grip on the party.

Yousaf, who has held government jobs since 2012, has sought to portray himself as a candidate who would build on Sturgeon’s record and defend the party’s socially and economically progressive direction. Forbes and former SNP community safety minister Ash Regan have billed themselves as candidates for change.

Regan, who resigned from the government last year and is seen as the outsider in the leadership race, started her pitch by saying that the SNP had “lost its way”.

In her introductory remarks, Forbes, who has been finance secretary since early 2020 but on maternity leave since last summer, said she would offer a new start for Scotland. “More of the same is not a manifesto, it’s an acceptance of mediocrity,” she said.

Yousaf hit back against Forbes’s attacks and implied that she had overstated her negotiating prowess and capabilities as finance secretary, saying that she had allowed the UK government to short-change Scotland by hundreds of millions of pounds during past budget discussions.

He also said he was the only candidate who would challenge Westminster’s decision to veto a Scottish law aimed at making it easier for trans people to legally change their gender.

Douglas Ross, leader of the opposition Scottish Conservatives, seized on Forbes’s suggestion that she would not keep Yousaf as health secretary if she won the leadership election, which ends on March 27.

“They fought like Nats in a sack and the only thing they agreed on was independence and dividing the country all over again,” Ross tweeted.

Additional reporting by Mure Dickie in Edinburgh