Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a weekly podcast from Politics Home.

I'm your host, Alan Tolhurst, and with you to discuss what the election of Humsey-Yusuf to

First Minister means for the prospects, Scottish independence and the S&P's rivals, is Labour MP Ian Murray,

shadow Scottish secretary, renowned pollster,

Sir John Curtis, Professor of Politics at Strathclyde University, and the former S&P, MP,

and front bench spokesperson, Stephen Gethins.

So I'm going to start with you, Stephen, before we move on to kind of what this means for

other parties.

You know, what does this really mean for the S&P, the importance of Humsey-Yusuf's win for him and also for the party more

generally? Well, I mean, first of all, and to be fair, Anna Sauer, the Labour leader was very

generous around this this week. I think it's a significant moment for Scotland to have its first

Muslim leader, I think the first Muslim leader in a Western

democratic nation. So I think that's that's one moment. It also brings to an end a really unusual

period for the SMP, which is its first really significant leadership election. And I know we've

got John Curtis here, so I'm mindful not to talk about polling, but we just went through an election whereby it was impossible to poll because this was an election with

SNP members, nobody knew how they were going to vote, so it told us quite a lot about the

SMP and the changes that's gone through since that Surgeon membership since 2014, and it's a

generational shift. You know, you're seeing Nicholas Sturgeon move on,

but almost as importantly, you're also seeing John Swinney moved on, who's been a really significant

figure in Devolve politics. He was also a former MP, but there were very few big decisions

that have been made, either Nicola Sturgeon or Alex Amund's governments, that didn't have an input

from John Swinney. So

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