Scotland

Oh dear. As the furore around Scotland’s Hate Crime Act extends into its sixth day, there are now fears about police spending as the force looks set to struggle with the sheer volume of complaints. It is understood that, since the Act was implemented on Monday, 40 officers a day have been required to work overtime to help tackle reports. With officers being paid time and a third for working extra hours, there are concerns about overstretching the Police Scotland budget. What a mess… Over 3,000 hate crime complaints were submitted in the first 24 hours of the Act and the Scottish Tories have predicted that at this rate, over

Scotland’s Hate Crime Act (HCA) has, by common agreement, been an unmitigated disaster. Less than a week old, there are already calls for it to be repealed – like the equally misconceived but more awfully named Offensive Behaviour at Football and Threatening Communications (Scotland) Act 2012. The police are now clearly hesitant of arresting anyone for hate crime The police have been swamped with thousands of complaints, many vexatious, all of which they are pledged to investigate. JK Rowling has blown the doors off with her ‘arrest me’ tweets, but the First Minister, Humza Yousaf, attracted more hate crime complaints in the first two days than she did. SNP Ministers like Siobhan Brown have been ridiculed for misrepresenting their own

As Scotland’s embattled First Minister continues to face backlash over his Hate Crime Act, his party has been hit with yet more bad news. New polling from YouGov suggests that Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour party will become the largest party in Scotland, taking 28 seats and pushing the SNP into second place. The Nats are predicted to lose almost 25 of their Westminster seats, retaining just 19, the next time the electorate head to the ballot box. The MRP poll suggests that Labour will sweep up across Scotland’s central belt – widely regarded within the Scottish party as being ‘the first red wall to fall’ – and is even predicted

Police Scotland, who are responsible for enforcing Humza Yousaf’s Hate Crime Act, have found no criminality in a series of tweets posted by JK Rowling. On Monday, the day the Scottish law came into effect, the author, a gender-critical feminist, tweeted about a number of men who call themselves women – and insisted they were still men. In doing so, she said that, if this was a crime, she would ‘look forward to being arrested’ under the Act, which carries prison sentences of up to seven years. I would say this took some balls on her part but such metaphors are probably best avoided given the subject in hand.  Responding to the

Humza Yousaf’s illiberal Hate Crime Act is now in force and its first day has been a doozy. The SNP’s minister for victims and community safety Siobhian Brown admitted on the Today programme that Scots could be investigated by the police for ‘misgendering’ trans people. It was revealed that one-third of police officers has still not received training on the legislation. JK Rowling posted a thread on Twitter discussing a number of transgender women and stated that all of them were men. The author, who is currently out of the country, added that, if saying this represents a criminal offence under the Hate Crime Act, ‘I look forward to being

It is now exactly a year since Humza Yousaf, Scotland’s First Minister, rose to the pinnacle of Scottish politics. Pretty much everything that has happened since entitles those who doubted his leadership skills, political judgment and basic competence to mutter ‘I told you so’. Even his most diehard supporters within the SNP must be starting to wonder what his leadership is all about. The warning signs were there from the start. Yousaf quickly emerged as the favourite to replace Nicola Sturgeon following her shock resignation last February. He simply wanted the job more than anyone else, and billed himself as the continuity candidate. He came under sustained attack from Kate

Would you trust this lot with assisted dying? The Scottish parliament’s record on issues of personal liberty has been pretty dire. Yet MSPs seem mustard-keen to introduce medically-supervised suicide as proposed by the Liberal Democrat MSP, Liam McArthur. His Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adults (Scotland) Bill, published today, is the third such Bill to hit Holyrood and the betting is that this one will go the distance. I’m not entirely sure this particular parliament possesses the moral standing to legislate on pot holes, let alone euthanasia ‘Too often’, says Alex Cole-Hamilton, the Scottish Lib Dem leader. ‘Dying people are facing traumatic deaths that harm both them and those they leave behind.’ He’s not

The Covid Inquiry’s recent Scottish sojourn brought several weeks of bad headlines for the SNP. One revelation got less attention than others but struck me as more significant than most, so I wrote about it for Coffee House. That revelation was an email chain dug up by the inquiry dating from the first summer of the pandemic. It contained a discussion about which countries should be added to the list of ‘travel corridor’ nations. In one email, a senior civil servant argued for Spain to be added to the list because ‘there is a real possibility they will never approve EU membership for an independent Scotland’ otherwise. If that seems

It’s the end of another rocky week for Scotland’s First Minister. Humza Yousaf has been dealing with national outrage over the hate crime bill and remains under pressure to sack one of his closest allies in the party over an £11,000 iPad scandal. So Kate Forbes’s latest intervention is the last thing he needs. On Thursday night, Yousaf’s onetime leadership rival admitted that the SNP lacks a ‘big vision’ and suggested that she hadn’t ruled out another leadership bid. Watch your back, Humza… At a Holyrood Sources podcast recording on Thursday night, Forbes told her audience that ‘people need to be inspired by leadership’, continuing:  As much as I back