Humza Yousaf ends SNP pact with Greens

After two and a half years in government together, Humza Yousaf has terminated the SNP’s governing pact with the Scottish Greens. The decision was rubber stamped at a hastily arranged meeting of the Scottish cabinet on Thursday morning. It preempts a vote by rank-and-file Green members on whether to walk away from Yousaf’s government after he ditched a key climate target. It means their party’s co-leaders, Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater, will lose their ministerial posts and the SNP will lose its overall majority in the Scottish parliament.

The Bute House Agreement, which the Greens originally signed with Nicola Sturgeon, has been a source of consternation inside the SNP right from the start. It brought into government a party with a raft of extremist views. The Scottish Greens have adopted the most hardline iteration of gender ideology, with their equalities spokesperson Maggie Chapman telling an interviewer in 2023 that it was worth ‘exploring’ whether eight-year-olds should be allowed to change their gender.