Humza Yousaf, the frontrunner to succeed Nicola Sturgeon as First Minister of the Scottish Government, was left with egg on his face this week after thoughtlessly asking a group of Ukrainian women in Edinburgh: “Where are all the men?”
While the overwhelming majority of allegedly “desperate” migrants from Albania, Africa, and Asia setting out for Britain from France — a safe European Union member-state — are fighting-age males, Scottish National Party (SNP) politician Yousaf found that a group of Ukrainian refugees he met with in an Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain centre in Edinburgh really were all women, leaving him apparently puzzled.
“So one question I have is where are all the men?” he asked in a now-viral video clip after posing for a photograph with the women, prompting what BBC correspondent James Cook described as “polite and awkward laughter before they explained that many of their partners had stayed in Ukraine to fight in the war.”
Yousaf, currently Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care in the Scottish Government — roughly equivalent to a U.S. State government — is currently the favourite to take over as leader of the left-separatist SNP once Nicola Sturgeon steps down.
He is best known both within and without Scotland as an advocate of imposing draconian restrictions on free speech in the name of combating “hate”, seeking to criminalise even private conversations in people’s homes if he does not approve of their content.
Indeed, Yousaf has confirmed that he has already “had” to report a “couple of incidents” to the authorities since he began his leadership campaign, with police officers seemingly moving with alacrity to get the politician’s alleged abusers in front of a judge.
The nature of the alleged abuse is currently unclear, but Yousaf added that he had had “hard conversations” with his family “about the racial and Islamophobic abuse that I get”.