Humza Yousaf’s troubling plan for an independent Scotland

Even with Nicola Sturgeon politically hors de combat, Scotland’s first minister Humza Yousaf has made it clear he intends to forge ahead with her plans to hold a second independence referendum. The Scottish government has produced its blueprint for the future constitution that could flow from such an independence vote. Any voter contemplating taking up Humza’s offer and voting Yes in a possible Indyref2 would do well to read this document closely. They could be letting themselves in for a great deal more than they thought.

Put simply, the plan is to make the SNP’s soft-left Bruntsfield-style ideology an almost irremovable feature in Scottish public life. A lot will be familiar. The incredibly generous franchise (all residents, whatever their nationality, and children over 16) would be entrenched. A coy proposal to ‘consider whether the size and composition of the Scottish parliament needed to change to reflect the additional responsibilities of independence’ translates into a predictable promise of big increases in the number of politicians and apparatchiks on the public dime.