Who is Humza Yousaf? Everything you need to know about SNP leader

Humza Yousaf has said he will resign as SNP leader and Scotland’s First Minister. Mr Yousaf made the lunchtime announcement on Monday having decided last week to end a power-sharing agreement between the SNP and Scottish Greens, in a move which backfired spectacularly.

Speaking at a press conference at his official residence in Edinburgh, Bute House, Yousaf said: "I am not willing to trade my values and principles or do deals with whomever, simply for retaining power."

Yousaf was facing a vote of no confidence, tabled by the Scottish Conservatives, while Scottish Labour had tabled one of no confidence in the Scottish Government as a whole, with both expected to take place this week.

Here's everything you need to know about Humza Yousaf's family, upbringing and policies.

Who are Humza Yousaf's parents?

Yousaf was born in 1985 in Rutherglen, near Glasgow, the child of Punjabi-Pakistani immigrants.

His father, Muzaffar Yousaf, arrived in the UK from Pakistan in the early 1960s with almost no spoken English. His mother, Shaaista Bhutta, arrived in the UK from Kenya, where she and her parents had suffered racism, sometimes violent.

"My grandfather was a train conductor, so he was seen as taking that job away from a black African, a black Kenyan, so life became very difficult,” Yousaf told Holyrood magazine last year. “My family was attacked a few times and there was one in particular when my maternal grandmother was attacked with an axe in the back. She survived and so on but that was the last straw for my grandfather, it was time to get away.”

Yousaf has often spoken of his pride in his background and of his parents’ story as immigrants to Scotland. He took his oath of office in both English and Urdu.

Who are Humza Yousaf's family?

Yousaf is married to his second wife, Nadia El-Nakla, who serves as an SNP councillor in Dundee. They have one child together and are expecting another this summer; he is also stepfather to her daughter. In 2021, the couple launched a legal challenge against a Dundee nursery that twice declined one of their children a place. Having suspected there was discrimination at play, El-Nakla and a friend applied for places for fictitious children using “white-sounding names” – and were accepted.

Yousaf unpacked the incident in a Twitter thread, describing how a reporter for the Daily Record newspaper was able to achieve the same outcome with another false application. He has made much of the importance of looking after his children despite holding the top job in Scotland, and will be taking paternity leave when his next child is born.

Education

After his early years at an overwhelmingly white-Scottish primary school, Yousaf was privately educated at Glasgow’s Hutchesons’ Grammar School. He has described how his experience there was a normal teenage one until 9/11, when he suddenly found himself being questioned by fellow pupils because of his Muslim faith and Pakistani ancestry.

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“The same guys I used to sit beside and talk to about football and all these others things, were now asking me questions I had no idea how to answer,” he told Holyrood. “They’re asking me things like, ‘why do Muslims hate America?’ It wasn’t malicious or anything, but they expected me to have the answers.”

He went on to study politics at the University of Glasgow.

Humza Yousaf on…religion

Yousaf is one of several senior Muslim leaders at the top of British politics, along with figures such as Sadiq Khan and Scottish Labour Leader Anas Sarwar. He has described his faith as very important to him, telling podcasters Rory Stewart and Alistair Campbell that the notion Muslims and Britons of Asian background are outsiders is false.

“I take great pride in it,” he said of his Muslim identity, describing the “common bond” he feels with other Muslim politicians he knows – and his staff’s surprise during his first meeting with Sadiq Khan as first minister. You come into these meetings usually and there’s a handshake and you sit down,” he said. “Sadiq gave me a big bear hug, and actually I just asked my officials if they could give us five minutes just so we could catch up about family before we got into politics.”

Humza Yousaf on…Independence

As with most SNP politicians, Scottish independence is Yousaf’s primary cause. He argues that many of Scotland’s national problems would be solved or at least improved by leaving the UK.

Under Yousaf’s leadership, the party has continued publishing a series of white papers making the case for independence and explaining how it would work across different policy areas. These have met with a muted reception, and a recent one on “Scotland’s Place in the World” caused a row among SNP supporters over the party’s nuclear weapons policy.

Worse, these efforts have done nothing to shift the polling. While support for the SNP in Scotland has fallen dramatically since its peak, support for independence remains roughly tied with support for staying in the UK. Neither position has a consistent majority, and a large proportion of Scottish voters are still undecided.

But the SNP’s main problem on this front is that there is currently no clear legal route to making independence happen. Under Sturgeon, the SNP could not secure the UK government’s approval for a second referendum, and a case brought in the UK Supreme Court by the Scottish government ended in a decision that the Scottish Parliament cannot call one unilaterally.

At a special conference in 2023, the SNP agreed a new plan: if wins a majority of seats in Scotland at the next Westminster election, it will treat that as a “mandate” for independence and unilaterally begin “withdrawal negotiations”. Yousaf has since muddied the water by saying the SNP simply needs to win “the most seats”.

He has also drilled down on a theme that he intends to make Scotland “Tory-free” – a phrasing that has been criticised by many in his party and on the independence side, who say it comes across as an attack on Tory-voting Scots rather than Scottish Tory MPs.

Humza Yousaf on…Gaza

Towards the end of 2023, the first minister’s parents-in-law were trapped in Gaza just as Israel began its devastating assault on the Palestinian enclave.

Elizabeth and Maged El-Nakla were among around 200 Britons in the line of fire after Hamas’s 7 October massacre. Fortunately, they were safely evacuated after just under a month. Yousaf’s public statements about the Gaza conflict have been informed by this personal connection, and he has consistently called for an immediate ceasefire.

Watch: Who could succeed Humza Yousaf? (Daily Record)

On Yousaf’s watch, the Scottish government has donated large sums to support aid for Palestinian refugees. He hit back furiously at a Daily Telegraph story alleging that he had a conflict of interest in sending funds to UNWRA, a UN agency operating in Palestine.

"Most of my political life, I've battled insinuations from sections of the media desperate to link me to terrorism despite campaigning my whole life against it,” he posted on X, formerly Twitter. “The latest smear from the Telegraph is just a continuation of these Islamophobic attacks."

Yousaf on…the NHS

Health is an area where Yousaf finds himself at a disadvantage compared to other party leaders: the Scottish NHS is overseen by the Scottish government, not Westminster, and Yousaf served as Scottish Health Minister from May 2021 until he took over as First Minister in March 2023.

His performance in the role is generally not remembered positively, and the health service is currently struggling. Waiting lists and A&E performance have not improved in Scotland in recent years, statistics on various health measures make for depressing reading, and the Scottish government’s handling of the Covid pandemic has been dragged unflatteringly into the light at a public inquiry.

The bigger picture does not look good either. An audit of the the Scottish NHS earlier this year found that the service is at risk of becoming unaffordable, and the Scottish arm of the British Medical Association (BMA) has also raised the alarm.

“We have sleepwalked into our current situation by continually ignoring the warning signs that Scotland's NHS is desperately struggling to meet growing demand,” said BMA Scotland Chairman Dr Iain Kennedy. “This is the inevitable consequence of years of ducking the hard decisions and refusing to have a realistic and open conversation about what is possible for the NHS to provide within current resources.”

Yousaf on…Immigration

As the Conservatives began taking an ever harder line on immigration, especially after the Brexit referendum, the SNP seized on the issue as one of the sharpest contrasts between Holyrood and Westminster.

“The SNP, the Scottish Government, values migration,” he said at First Minister’s Questions at the end of last year. “We value the importance of it to our social fabric but also to our economy, and let me say unequivocally that in Scotland, the Scottish Government will always say that we are proud of the benefits that migrants bring to this country, and we are proud that they have chosen Scotland to be their home.”

In a podcast interview earlier this year, he said that former Home Secretary Suella Braverman was “the very definition or personification of somebody pulling up the ladder after they’ve made it to the top”, and accused the Tories of “debasing and denigrating” politics to the point where finding a “sensible approach” to managing immigration is all but impossible.

Yousaf on…Cost of Living

Yousaf’s government has been taking steps to try and lower Scottish residents’ cost of living, the boldest being a council tax freeze announced in the recent Scottish budget.

The policy is highly controversial. Many council leaders warned that it will force them to cut already struggling public services, and claimed they were not adequately consulted before the plan was first announced in late 2023. The government’s critics have argued that the policy will benefit Scotland’s wealthiest homeowners while offering little benefit to those at the sharp end of the cost of living crisis, who will have to settle for another squeeze on vital public services.

Since becoming first minister, Yousaf has also repeatedly stressed that he wants to “eradicate” poverty from Scotland. Child poverty in particular was a favourite theme of Nicola Sturgeon’s, but her government’s record on poverty did not live up to her goals: when she left office in 2023, 24 per cent of children in Scotland were living in relative poverty after housing costs, a marginal increase on previous figures.