Stephen Daisley

The safety of women in prisons cannot be allowed to plummet back down the news agenda after the latest Sturgeon saga is over. Not least because today has seen the publication of a report into one women’s prison in Gloucestershire that makes for troubling reading. HMP Eastwood Park, which holds 348 women, was the subject of an unannounced inspection in October last year. Staff from HM Inspectorate of Prisons made several findings that you’d expect: high levels of mental ill health; backgrounds of criminality, homelessness and substance abuse; and prison understaffing.  However, they found plenty more. There was ‘no central record or oversight of the number of women who had been segregated, the reasons why or for how long’.

Nicola Sturgeon is going nowhere. Some of her more excitable critics reckon the complete implosion of her policy on transgender prisoners could finish off her premiership. Not least since it comes just as she was planning a fightback against the UK government’s decision to block her Gender Recognition Reform (GRR) Bill. The SNP leader has been subjected to cringe-making TV interviews about whether she thinks rapists are women if they say so and awkward questions at Holyrood about placing male sex offenders in women’s prisons. She has been forced to U-turn repeatedly and has rushed out new regulations on transgender prisoners at odds with the self-identification principle at the heart of her GRR Bill.

Millennials and Generation Z pride themselves on being ‘anti-racist’. We might, then, expect that remembering the Holocaust properly would be important to them – it was the largest act of racial hatred in modern history. The truth is very different and more troubling. New research commissioned by the Claims Conference finds Dutch millennials and Gen Z are more likely than the rest of the public to be ignorant of the Holocaust, deny the facts, oppose acknowledging the Netherlands’s role, and be sympathetic to contemporary Nazism. While 12 per cent of Dutch adults believe ‘the Holocaust is a myth’ or ‘the number of Jews who died has been greatly exaggerated’, that jumps to 23 per cent among those aged 18 to 39.

Will no one think of the middle classes? It’s not the most stirring call to arms. When Scottish Labour MSP Michael Marra complained that ‘the doors are closed’ at universities to ‘Scottish pupils from ordinary families and an average school’, Nicola Sturgeon quipped that she ‘used to be regularly criticised for the fact that too few young people from deprived communities were going to university’, but now she was ‘being criticised for the fact that too many of them are going to university’. As ever with Sturgeon, the rhetoric is facile and the reality much more prosaic. That more young people from disadvantaged backgrounds are getting into university is no bad thing, but nor is it a symbol of an egalitarian Scotland.

'Flower of Scotland' is the unofficial national anthem north of the border but soon enough we may never hear its like again. Jim Telfer, one of the country’s most celebrated rugby coaches, has called for the song to be dropped at sporting events in favour of an alternative that ‘shows us standing for something rather than against something as a country’. His plea has been echoed by former Scotland international Jim Aitken, who wrote to the Times dismissing the song as an ‘anti-English dirge’.  Telfer’s complaint prompted Lord McConnell, a former Labour first minister, to urge a more ‘positive’ musical number, while Scottish Tory MSP Murdo Fraser deemed the current tune too ‘jingoistic’.

Nicola Sturgeon is angry. The UK government has confirmed it will block her party’s controversial gender Bill, which removes key safeguards from the process by which someone can have their preferred gender rather than their biological sex recognised in law. Opponents, critics and legal commentators warned during the Bill’s passage before Christmas that it could change how the law operates not only in Scotland but in England and Wales, too. Sturgeon decided she knew better, a genre of governance already familiar to people in Scotland. She pushed the Bill through and now the Secretary of State for Scotland Alister Jack has invoked Section 35, a never-before-used provision of the Scotland Act which impedes Royal Assent for a devolved Bill.  Hence why Sturgeon is angry. Very angry.

Ministers will come under increased pressure to block Nicola Sturgeon’s gender legislation with the publication of a new Policy Exchange paper today. This examination of the Gender Recognition Reform Bill concludes it will have serious impacts on the rest of the UK. The Bill removes the safeguards involved in obtaining a gender recognition certificate, the means by which a man can have the law treat him as a woman, and vice versa. It was pushed through the Scottish parliament before Christmas with little time for debate At present, the law requires an applicant to be 18 or older, to have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria by a clinician and to prove they have lived in their preferred ‘gender identity’ for at least two years.

The Scottish parliament returned from its Christmas recess today and held its first debate of 2023. Take a guess what it was about.  Yes, independence. Holyrood occasionally touches on other matters – the NHS, the educational attainment gap – but these are mere throat-clearings in a never-ending dialogue between the SNP government and its hardline followers.  This strategy, though counter-intuitive, has thus far proved pretty useful to Nicola Sturgeon: the more she gins up her supporters with talk of breaking away from the UK, the less they seem to notice that she hasn’t taken them a single inch in that direction in eight years as SNP leader.

I spend a lot of my time fantasising about the death of the Conservative Party. I like to picture election night 2024 and Huw Edwards struggling to keep up with the mounting Tory defeats: ‘Labour gains Chingford from Iain Duncan Smith, former leader of — Wait, I’m being told Labour has also gained Chipping Barnet. I think that’s been Tory since Reginald Maudling won it in — Goodness. We go live to Laura Kuenssberg with some significant news about Priti Patel. Laura, we understand Witham is heading for a recount…’  The fantasy reaches a crescendo with the election’s Portillo moment: Suella Braverman — out. This reverie is not motivated by any enthusiasm for Labour. I doubt if I’ll ever be able to vote for them again.

The Tories are finally coming to see what has long been plain to the rest of us: Rishi Sunak is a dud. He’s not a walking catastrophe like Liz Truss but he’s hopelessly out of touch, helplessly out of his depth and has no plan for turning things around. His conversation with a homeless man at a shelter, in which the Prime Minister chirpily enquired whether the bloke was a business owner, has been somewhat misrepresented by Labour and its colleagues in the activist media. Sunak did not blurt out his silly question from nowhere: the man had been questioning him about his management of the economy and the benefits to London of a booming financial sector.

The UK government’s threat to block Nicola Sturgeon’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill took many by surprise. The powers, under Section 35 of the Scotland Act, have never been used before. The assumption from some observers, this one included, was that this was a negotiating tactic ahead of inter-governmental discussions on the Bill’s implementation and cross-border issues that might arise. That assumption appears to be wrong. I understand that raising the spectre of Section 35 is not a negotiating tactic: ministers are seriously contemplating it and legal advice is being sought. Among ministers’ concerns are questions over passports, driving licences and public safety.

One of the fundamental flaws in the Scottish devolution settlement set up by Labour and radically expanded by the Tories is the ability for policy divergence in Scotland to impact on the rest of the UK. The Gender Recognition Reform Bill, on the cusp of being passed by the Scottish parliament, might prove an object lesson. The Bill overhauls the process by which a person obtains a gender recognition certificate (GRC). This is the document which recognises an applicant’s gender identity in place of their biological sex. For example, a male who identifies as female and acquires a GRC becomes female in the eyes of the law.  The Bill being pushed through Holyrood by Nicola Sturgeon’s government makes this process easier, faster and open to more people.

The Scottish parliament will today consider final amendments to the Gender Recognition Reform Bill. The Bill, a key priority of Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP-Green government, will update the Gender Recognition Act 2004, the legislation governing the acquisition of a gender recognition certificate (GRC). Once a person obtains a GRC, ‘the law will recognise them as having all the rights and responsibilities appropriate to a person of their acquired gender’.  At present, a man who wishes the law to recognise him as a woman, or vice versa, must be at least 18 years of age and must undergo a long process based on medical evidence of gender dysphoria.

No matter how heavily it snows today nothing will be as frosty as Pete Wishart's resignation letter. The senior SNP MP has exited the front bench following the coup that replaced Ian Blackford with relative newcomer Stephen Flynn.  Blackford is an ally of Nicola Sturgeon and discontent had grown in the party's Westminster group of MPs about his perceived lack of independence from the leadership in Scotland. Flynn, who at 34 only entered Parliament in 2019, is expected to put distance between his Westminster group and the SNP government in Edinburgh. As MP for Aberdeen South he is seen as less hostile to the North Sea oil and gas industry than Sturgeon, a recent convert to the climate cause.  https://twitter.

Nicola Sturgeon did not want Stephen Flynn to be the new leader of the SNP at Westminster. His victory represents not only a generational shift – Flynn is 34 and his deputy Mhairi Black is 28 – but a sharp left turn in political sensibilities. Where outgoing Commons leader Ian Blackford was cautious and loyal to Sturgeon, the Flynn-Black team is expected to be more independent-minded.  Their instincts are closer to those of the SNP grassroots: they are impatient with the pace of progress towards another referendum. The Supreme Court ruling on where the power to call a referendum lies has only thrown such frustrations into relief. The SNP will have to find a new way forward and a fresher, younger face was thought better suited to that task.