Former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has branded Humza Yousaf’s decision to sack the Greens from Government as “catastrophic”. Sturgeon brought the Greens into power for the first time anywhere in the UK with the Bute House Agreement in 2021.
The two pro-independence parties struck an agreement on a range of policy areas and the Greens were given two Ministerial positions. But Yousaf, who succeeded her as SNP First Minister in 2024 – ended the agreement after internal pressure from inside the SNP.
He summoned Green co-leaders Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater to Bute House before sacking them and making them walk out in front of the media.
Speaking about his decision, Sturgeon told the Institute for Government think tank: “I think crashing that agreement was catastrophic and – politics aside – totally the wrong thing to do for stable government.”
Yousaf also spoke about his “real regret” at the speed at which he ended the deal. He told the IoG he wished he had “taken more time to speak it through and come to some kind of almost mutual agreement”.
Scottish Green Party members were due to hold a vote on the future of the deal and Yousaf said he took the decision before being “dumped by the Greens”.
Yousaf recalled his phone had been “burning hot” with calls for him to end the deal after Harvie failed to adhere to the Government’s line on gender identity services. He said people who had been “absolute supporters of the Bute House Agreement in the past” had urged him to end the deal at that point.
He said the calls had come from SNP colleagues who had been “architects of the Bute House Agreement”. Yousaf said: “Ultimately I took the decision to do it, and my real regret is not taking more time over that decision.”
Yousaf, who is standing down at the next election, said: “I wish I’d taken more time to speak it through and come to some kind of almost mutual agreement with Patrick and Lorna, which probably wasn’t possible. But at least if I’d taken some more time and had some more conversation, it might have softened the blow somewhat.”
Slater described the ending of the agreement as being “quite sudden”. She told told the think tank: “I think even up to two days beforehand he was saying the agreement was worth its weight in gold.”
She said of Yousaf: “I still think there was a bit of a miscalculation there, because he was then subject to the threat of a vote of no confidence. He had just collapsed a confidence and supply agreement.”
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