Divisive identity politics is the reason for the SNP’s downfall - Bill Carmichael

Given that 96 per cent of Scotland’s population is white, it is difficult to understand why Mr Yousaf was so surprised. If he ever visits Nigeria he is going to be absolutely astonished to discover that most senior posts are occupied by black people.

Mr Yousaf, along with the SNP, Labour, and the far left Green Party, are fierce advocates of divisive identity politics which seeks to divide people instead of uniting them - precisely the opposite of old fashioned leftism.

It turns the old adage of Dr Martin Luther King Junior - that we should judge people by the content of their character and not the colour of their skin - on its head. Instead, identity politics highlights the differences between us and places us on a hierarchy of victimhood.

It magnifies those attributes we can’t do anything about - our race, sex, sexuality and the colour of our skin - and completely ignores those things that we can change - the “content of our character”.

As a result it fatally undermines any notion of class solidarity. The single mother struggling to survive on a rough Glasgow housing estate will always be the “oppressor”, because she is white. The well heeled barrister residing in an elegant Edinburgh townhouse will always be the “oppressed” because he is black.

It is a bonkers dogma that spawned in American university campuses and has taken root in institutions across the West, in governments, big business, academia, the judiciary and the police.

In Scotland the impact of this ideology has been entirely malign. Like the rest of the UK the Scottish people’s priorities are straightforward - jobs, wages, prices, health, education, housing and crime.

The SNP-Green Party coalition government’s record on all of these has been dismal. For example, Scottish schools, once the envy of Europe, have plummeted down international league tables. Health outcomes are appalling with high rates of smoking, obesity and drug and alcohol abuse. Over a million people live in poverty, a quarter of them children. Scotland has the highest rate of drug-related deaths in the whole of Europe.

Instead the Scottish government concentrated money and effort into fashionable causes that impact on an infinitesimally small number of people and make absolutely no difference to the very real struggles of the majority.

For example, it introduced self-ID for trans people in the teeth of repeated warnings from safeguarding experts and feminist groups that it would make single sex spaces for girls and women harder to protect.

Anyone who raised reasonable concerns about the impact on prisons, hospitals, gyms and schools, were denounced by government ministers as bigots and racists.

The whole house of cards came tumbling down when - as had been widely predicted - a double rapist announced he identified as a woman and was sent to a women’s prison. The Scottish government made itself an international laughing stock.

Then there was Yousaf’s Orwellian hate crime law, which criminalises opinions even if expressed in your own home.

Cue more chaos as trans activists mass reported anyone who disagreed with them safe in the knowledge that the police would be forced to investigate.

The police were - again predictably - overwhelmed with more than 7,000 online hate crime reports in the first week after the law came into force.

Police are required to investigate every single one of these non-crimes, while murders, rapes, robberies and burglaries remain unsolved.

Then there were net zero targets that were so crazily unrealistic that they had to be dropped, and a criminal investigation into SNP finances, which all contributed to the current omnishambles north of the border.

But let’s not forget also the rank incompetence. The Scottish government set out to build two new ferries to serve the Western Isles, which should be a simple task for what was once one of the greatest shipbuilding nations in the world.

They were supposed to come into service in 2018, but six years later there is no sign of them and the costs have tripled to around £360m.

We should be thankful to the SNP for showing any future government exactly how not to do it.