Humza Yousaf has just executed an embarrassing U-turn and effectively banned XL Bully dogs in line with England and Wales. This has inevitably unleashed a pack of bad canine puns about the SNP making a dog’s breakfast of devolution. We always thought Humza Yousaf was barking, now we know. Boom boom.
Laughter aside, this episode is another botched exercise in cross-border grievance mongering, something at which the SNP used to be so adept. When the UK government announced last September that there was to be a ban selling or breeding these aggressive animals, following a spate of attacks on people, Mr Yousaf said: not so fast. Scotland wasn’t about jump to the UK government’s tune in outlawing maligned canines.
The Community Safety Minister, Siobhian Brown, wrote to the UK government in November ‘advising’ that a ban would not be introduced in Scotland by the deadline of 31 December.
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