Once again Scotland makes the news for all the wrong reasons. From the Times:
Scotland’s national library banned a book about feminists’ fight against Nicola Sturgeon’s gender self-ID law after staff complained its contents were “hate speech” comparable to racism.
The National Library of Scotland (NLS) has been accused of a “shameful” capitulation to censorship after it emerged that The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht, a collection of essays by gender-critical women, had been cut from a major exhibition celebrating the institution’s centenary.
Members of the public had been asked by the library, which promotes itself as a national forum for “ideas, debate and discussion”, to nominate books which had shaped their lives for inclusion in a ten-month public display intended as a “love letter” to the power of reading.
However, despite The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht receiving double the number of nominations necessary to guarantee inclusion in the Dear Library public display, Amina Shah, Scotland’s national librarian and the NLS chief executive, decided not to include the book after a staff backlash.
It's the same old story: young zealots making a lot of noise, and senior staff too pathetic to stand up to them.
Documents seen by The Times show a major row broke out at the national library in which some workers repeatedly lobbied for the removal of the critically acclaimed collection of essays, edited by the policy analyst Lucy Hunter Blackburn and the newspaper columnist Susan Dalgety and including a contribution by JK Rowling.
Shah ultimately decided not to include the book due to concerns about “the potential impact on key stakeholders” who she feared could “withdraw support for the exhibition and the centenary”.
Dalgety and Hunter Blackburn said it had been “devastating” to learn that their book had been “censored in this cowardly and anti-democratic way by our national library”.
In a letter to Shah, they have called for the decision to be reversed, and for a meeting so that she can explain to them in person why they had allowed their work to be treated as a “dangerous object” rather than an account of a significant period in Scottish political history.
“But this is about more than the book,” they added. “This is the legacy of a decade of political leadership which has demonised and delegitimised people who refused to conform to the approved narrative on sex and gender identity.
“The material released also lifts the lid on the network of discrimination and censorship which operates across Scotland’s public institutions with impunity through staff networks and other activist groups, enabled by weak leadership.”
Added:
This is a blatant example of public censorship by one of the foundational cultural institutions in the country.
It goes against the values of librarianship: intellectual freedom; neutrality; public benefit. https://t.co/5Je8Yps39U
— Lucy Hunter Blackburn (@LucyHunterB) August 12, 2025
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Phew.
Mick Hartley 
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