Kate Forbes and Ash Regan at at Eden Court, Inverness, on 4 March. Photograph: Reuters
The frontrunners fighting to succeed Nicola Sturgeon as Scotland’s first minister have clashed over whether to defend or abandon her centre-left, socially inclusive policies.
In a further sign of the divisions opening up within the SNP, Humza Yousaf warned his rivals that support for the party and independence would be badly damaged if they abandoned her “progressive agenda”.
Yousaf told the Guardian it would be “pretty dangerous” if the next SNP leader and first minister moved away from Sturgeon’s centre-left policies and manifesto commitments, since those had seen it comfortably win successive elections.
Yousaf implied that the policies pushed by Kate Forbes, the finance secretary seen as Yousaf’s closest rival, and Ash Regan, a former minister who quit the government over Sturgeon’s gender recognition reforms, would fracture the yes movement and cut SNP support at the next election.
“I think our vision of a socially just Scotland, both within devolution but importantly as an independent nation, has brought us masses of support,” said Yousaf, the Scottish health secretary.
“Because that chimes with the values of the majority of the people of Scotland, I think it would be pretty dangerous for anybody to veer off that progressive agenda. I think that would lose support. I think our movement wouldn’t grow. I think support for independence wouldn’t grow.”
Yousaf said he had no problem being dubbed the pro-Sturgeon “continuity candidate”, because “what we’ll be continuing is over 15 years of winning elections, 15 years of a progressive agenda that’s grown our support”.
That stance was challenged by Forbes. Speaking on BBC Radio Scotland on Sunday, she said increased economic growth, support for small businesses and fiscal responsibility had to be prioritised. “That is the mission just now,” she said.
Forbes insisted that she supported the SNP’s centre-left positioning, but pressed on the NHS’s significant problems and on the economy, she said a “fundamental shift” was needed. In an implied dig at Yousaf’s competence as health secretary, she said: “Continuity won’t cut it. Keep doing the same things and we’ll keep getting the same result.”
The leadership contest sparked by Sturgeon’s surprise decision in February to resign as SNP leader and first minister, after eight years in both roles, had seen intense debates over a number of her signature policies.
Kate Forbes, an evangelical Christian seen as Yousaf’s closest rival, and Regan, trailing in third place, have challenged Sturgeon’s policies on cutting oil and gas production on climate grounds, her bottle and can deposit scheme, gender recognition and on securing independence.
Those policies are central to a coalition deal Sturgeon brokered with the pro-independence Scottish Green party in 2021, which led to the Greens’ two co-leaders becoming ministers for the first time, and cementing a pro-independence majority at Holyrood.
Forbes and Regan also pledge to accelerate two major road-widening schemes in the Highlands and north east – the A9 to Inverness and the A96 from Aberdeen. The Scottish Greens are deeply critical of road-widening, and have said the coalition would collapse if policies central to it were dropped or diluted.
A practising Muslim vying to become the SNP’s first ethnic minority leader, Yousaf said some of Sturgeon’s policies needed to be tweaked and implied that her style of leadership was too centralised.
He has pledged to exclude small firms from the bottle deposit scheme for a year and has dropped Sturgeon’s attempt to use the next general election as a “de facto” referendum.
But he said protecting the SNP’s alliance with the Scottish Greens was essential. “The deal with the Greens is worth its weight in gold,” he said. “I think any other person who, on their first day as first minister, discards the only other pro-independence party in Holyrood, there’s no way they can claim to bring our movement together.”
Regan endured a difficult interview with Laura Kuenssberg on BBC1 on Sunday morning where she was pressed to explain how she could deliver independence via an election, as there is no legal route to do so, and what she meant by a “readiness thermometer” on independence.
She said an index of progress towards independence would be a better way of expressing her “readiness thermometer” concept.
Regan said a majority vote for pro-independence parties would be the “trigger point” for talks on leaving the UK – a stance that both the Tories and Labour, and Yousaf and Forbes, have rejected. The SNP has never won a majority of all the votes in an election.
Voting among the SNP 100,000 members starts on 23 March, with the result expected on Monday 27 March.
