SNP factions will determine the new First Minister of Scotland

Their orchestrated messages are replete with the glossary of party loyalty.

Owen Thompson, an MP, talks of a “clear vision for the road ahead to independence”. Karen Adam talks of “the incredible progressive body of work we have put in etc, etc”. Clare Adamson, an MSP, says Mr Yousaf will “stand up for Scotland”.

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In the well-worn lexicon of SNP sloganizing there is no phrase more devoid of meaning than “standing up for Scotland”. Occasionally I wish someone would pledge to “fall down for Scotland”.

They’re all framed in party yellow and each seems tinged with a degree of desperation. Mr Yousaf is the clear choice of the management to succeed Nicola Sturgeon and those who have flourished under her patronage, like Anne McLaughlin, the MP for Glasgow North East. Ms McLaughlin replaced Joanna Cherry, widely regarded across the House as the party’s most formidable performer, as the SNP’s Westminster spokesperson on justice. Ms Cherry was sacked following a two-year campaign of bullying and intimidation for her gender-critical views.

Ms McLaughlin (pictured below) also felt obliged to make her support for Mr Yousaf official with the designated yellow frame. However, her name was spelt wrongly on this. Ms McLaughlin seems bright and capable. If she’d had agency in this she surely wouldn’t have permitted such a spelling error to have gone out uncorrected.

If Mr Yousaf fails to become leader then the rigorously imposed system of patronage exercised by Nicola Sturgeon will collapse. There will be a clear-out of the acolytes and supplicants who gained favour in her medieval court. Dozens of advisers will lose their jobs; others will be put to work out of harm’s way. The entire edifice of the party executive will be dismantled and its chief executive, Peter Murrell, will be told his services are no longer required.

Several MPs and MSPs of modest abilities who yet found this to be no bar to advancement into the higher echelons of government will similarly be looking about them. Others who were favoured with improbably high listings will find that route closed off.

This partly explains the febrile desire of some party professionals to have Mr Yousaf installed as leader. It’s also contributed to the malodorous whiff coming off this contest. “Rigged” is perhaps putting it too strongly, but it’s clear the party machinery is grinding away in the background.

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The winner of this contest will become leader of the country, yet the party executive chose to shorten the contest and squeeze the scrutiny of what passes for hustings into an abridged timeframe open to a tiny fraction of the membership. The process of enabling attendance at these events remains, shall we say… opaque.

Remarkably, Mr Murrell is still around to oversee the process, despite a police investigation into issues surrounding party finances which all occurred on his watch. Is there a fear the wrong candidate will be looking for the keys to some unopened boxes? Remarkably too, the party refuses to publish its membership numbers. Yet, only a few years ago, it was issuing updates on numbers as though they were lottery wins.

It matters in a contest like this. Following the selection results for the last Holyrood election, candidates were never given the numbers of votes, only the percentages. This provides scope for ballot stuffing. In response, party HQ – staffed by people who know their jobs depend on a specific outcome – claim that the process has been handed to an external firm.

Those in the know suspect that central to this remains a system which allows the executive suite to see the votes being cast in real time. This has led to historic claims that information had been leaked to favoured candidates so that they could tweak their campaign focus accordingly.

The contest itself has been conducted largely in an atmosphere of mutual respect and this is to the candidates’ credit. All three of them have a ridiculously small budget to work within, which also precludes any of them making use of paid party staffers for the duration of the contest.

Among the casualties has been the word "progressive". What a battering it has taken. It’s been twisted to convey something that it clearly is not. Once, this would have indicated a desire to improve the social circumstances of people and communities suffering the ill effects of ultra right-wing and reactionary policies.

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It would have been manifest in a policy agenda targeting long-term unemployment, stagnant wages, the cartelism of energy suppliers, the causes of drug deaths in poor neighbourhoods, and an enlightened tax apparatus aimed at redistributing wealth. In the Sturgeon era, it’s been carefully de-coupled from these aims and used as a weapon in the gaseous terrain where identity politics lies.

This is because in Ms Sturgeon’s time as First Minister her government has manifestly failed to deliver any progress whatsoever in these areas. Best then to shift the goalposts and make it mean something else.

Thus, those self-identifying as progressives merely favour the route of least resistance to capitalism and take refuge in a form of cultural and regressive totalitarianism that specialises in targeting those who refuse to bend the knee to narcissism and fake virtue.

The clear-out that will happen in the event of Ash Regan or Kate Forbes winning is about much more than the brutal process of reprisal and favour. All those executives and advisers and the ruling national executive committee have left this party in a parlous state. In the last eight years it has become a deeply unpleasant entity where bullying and intimidation have been permitted to flourish.

The party has never been more riven by dispute and its upper echelons have been hollowed out by bad actors who care little about independence. They have set the cause of self-determination back by a decade. They have failed and failed utterly.

Mr Yousaf in particular has some explaining to do. He has been a minister for more than a decade. Rather than setting out his agenda to tool up the Yes movement, he should be explaining just what he and his government have been doing all this time.

Whatever it is, very little of it has been about securing independence.