Mick Hartley

More on Nicola Sturgeon and her fixation with gender reform, from Janice Turner:

Ironically the Scottish government is driving through GRA [Gender Recognition Act] reform to prove its progressive credentials compared with backward, conservative England just as global opinion turns. Concern that a worldwide spike in mentally ill teenage girls identifying as boys is caused by social contagion has led to new clinical caution. The independent Cass review into England’s child gender services notes that social transition — changing your name and pronouns — is “not a neutral act” but propels children towards hormones and surgery. What bigger, more concrete act of social transition than changing your legal birth sex! How are schools expected to treat a 16-year-old male child with a female birth certificate?

Yet, apart from requiring under-18s to live for six rather than three months in “required gender”, the Scottish government has done nothing to ensure that young people — who can’t get even a tattoo until they’re 18 — don’t make a hard-to-reverse mistake. Calls for them to require a counter-signature (as with a passport) from someone who knows them were struck down. An SNP committee member decried such “safeguarding” as middle class. Her Green colleagues want the minimum age to be even lower.

Already GRA reform has provoked the SNP government’s biggest ever rebellion and the resignation of the minister Ash Regan, who said her conscience wouldn’t allow her to support the bill because it endangered women and girls. Polls suggest public opposition to these radical, hasty reforms. Self-ID was not even in the SNP manifesto, so why is Sturgeon squandering so much political capital?

Some believe she seeks a tangible legacy, which, given the parlous state of Scottish education and NHS, she lacks. Or that, cynically, she would like the Westminster government to strike down her new GRA if it believes it undermines protections under the Equality Act. Then Sturgeon could enjoy a proxy nationalist battle in the Supreme Court: see how the English won’t let us make our own laws!

So, backed by supine Labour MSPs who conceal their many private misgivings, this deep hasty new law will be whipped through. The safeguarding of young people, female dignity, hard-won rights and truth itself, all chucked aside for ideology and political expediency.

Sturgeon sees all this as progressive – and so, it seems, does Keir Starmer. Will the whole of the UK follow in Scotland's footsteps if Labour gets in? I think we should be told.