I just saw this in the Guardian.
The former first minister of Scotland, Humza Yousaf, has said that the racist and Islamophobic of recent days have made him question whether it is safe for his family to remain in the UK.
He told the Newsagents podcast yesterday evening: “You cut me open, I’m as about as Scottish as you come … but the truth of the matter is, I don’t know whether the future for me and my wife and my three children is going to be here in Scotland, or the UK, or indeed in Europe and the West, because I have for some time really worried about the rise of Islamophobia.”
Yousaf said that, while politicians across parties in Scotland had told a more positive story of immigration than in England, given the country’s struggles with depopulation, “don’t let any of your viewers or listeners think that I’m suggesting that Scotland is immune from racism or Islamophobia, it absolutely is not.
“I have been on the receiving end of many a death threat from Scotland, and many people in Scotland, I’m afraid, have been charged because of the abuse that they have thrown my way, because of my race or because of my religion”
Yousaf, who became Scotland’s first Muslim leader when he was elected FM in 2023, also highlighted “institutional Islamophobia” at Westminster, saying:
We have sitting in the current crop of MPs, a former home secretary who could write in one of the biggest selling broadsheet newspapers in the country that the Islamists are taking over. Nigel Farage, who has called Muslims, ‘a fifth column’. Example after example of where the language of the far-right driven by Islamophobia has now become institutionalised in our politics.