What was the Bute House agreement?
In August 2021, Nicola Sturgeon, then the dominant figure of Scottish politics, announced a “groundbreaking” alliance with the Scottish Greens at Bute House, the elegant Edinburgh residence of Scotland’s first ministers.
Flanked by Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater, the Scottish Greens’ co-leaders, Sturgeon said the agreement – the first time in the UK that green politicians had been in government – would usher in a new era of “cooperation and consensus building” and ultimately would deliver a “greener, fairer independent Scotland”.
Cementing a pro-independence majority at Holyrood after the nationalists fell short of a majority the 2021 Holyrood elections, Sturgeon accepted the Green case for cutting North Sea oil drilling; stronger protections for marine life; an ambitious bottle recycling scheme and new protections for minorities, including gender recognition reforms.
Sturgeon and Harvie saw this deal as the embodiment of the rainbow alliance that energised the yes movement in the 2014 independence referendum.
What went wrong?
That dream soon unravelled, undermined chiefly by Sturgeon herself. In February 2023, after suffering legal defeats over her independence plans and wearied by the rolling crises over NHS waiting lists, gender recognition reform and public sector pay, Sturgeon announced she was standing down as first minister and SNP leader.
Her resignation uncorked the pent-up opposition to her radicalism within the SNP, leading inexorably to Thursday’s snap decision by Humza Yousaf to rip the agreement up.
The Bute House agreement was weaponised by Sturgeon’s internal critics during the election campaign to succeed her. Kate Forbes, who narrowly lost to Yousaf in that contest, repeatedly attacked Sturgeon’s social liberalism and embrace of pro-climate policies – but Yousaf pledged to continue her progressive agenda.
Critics of the agreement feared its radicalism would play badly outside urban Scotland and alienate the centrist voters crucial to the election-winning coalition built up by Sturgeon’s predecessor, Alex Salmond.
The defection of Yousaf’s other leadership challenger, Ash Regan, to Salmond’s Alba party last October was an early sign of how unhappy SNP MSPs were becoming with the Green partnership.
There was growing concern that voters had the impression that the Scottish government was too focused on equalities issues at the expense of the day to day concerns of the public who were more worried about cost of living issues.
“The SNP has always been in tune with the public, but now it feels like our priorities are not reflecting people’s priorities and I can’t remember a time previously when it felt that way,” said one usually supportive MP.
Driven by Labour’s surge in Scottish opinion polls, which suggest the SNP could lose dozens of seats at the general election, Yousaf had already begun cutting the Greens off. He announced a council tax freeze without consulting the Greens, after the SNP were humiliated by Labour in last autumn’s Rutherglen byelection. He warned Scottish voters last month that backing the Greens in the general election was a wasted vote.
The Scottish Greens too became frustrated by setbacks on policies such as gender recognition, marine protections and latterly climate strategy. The decision last week to abandon Scotland’s agenda-setting target to cut carbon emissions by 75% by 2030 was the final straw.
What is likely to happen now?
Yousaf hopes that ending the Bute House agreement will curb the growing criticisms of his leadership from within the SNP, which saw seven SNP MSPs revolt over justice reform plans this week, and calm the frayed nerves of his MPs who fear heavy losses to Labour in the general election.
This will all be academic if he loses the vote of no confidence in his leadership tabled by the Scottish Conservatives immediately after he announced the end of the “coalition of chaos”, as Tory leader Douglas Ross describes it.
On Thursday afternoon, Scottish Greens described a sense of “disappointment and hurt” among party members after the announcement, which came “completely out of the blue” after the first minister’s supportive comments earlier in the week.
And as a mark of their fury at what many Green members view as Yousaf’s betrayal of progressive values and capitulation to the right of his party, Harvie announced that his MSPs would back the Tory motion.
The SNP is two votes short of a majority in Holyrood, so the Tories need the Greens’ seven votes or a rebellion by SNP backbenchers against Yousaf to win. But even then, a vote of no confidence has no legal force: Scotland’s elections are governed by statute; a leader’s departure does not automatically mean a government falls.
What does this mean for Humza Yousaf?
Assuming Yousaf survives the vote, he signalled on Thursday he will start watering down or shedding unpopular policies in an attempt to reverse the decline in SNP support and placate his centre-right SNP critics, in preparation for a general election.
If his advisers are correct, this could define Yousaf and save his political career. He said on Thursday his snap decision to abandon the Bute House agreement was a sign of strength and leadership. Much depends on what he does next and what his party critics do.
If he does not survive, the key issue for SNP MSPs is who could succeed him as leader and save the SNP from humiliation at the general election.
The biggest question is how voters respond: they are already shifting to Labour and this crisis could confirm the feeling that the SNP are too split and tired to remain in power. And fighting Labour in the centre ground may be far harder than Yousaf realises.
