Mick Hartley

Euan McColm on the disgraceful Police Scotland action against For Women Scotland campaigner Susan Smith:

Police officers based at the Scottish parliament have ordered Smith to attend an Edinburgh cop shop where she will receive a formal warning over an incident at a recent protest outside Holyrood. The 54-year-old has been warned failure to attend will lead to her being charged with vandalism.

This black farce follows the briefest interaction between Smith and an angry trans activist during a rally outside the Scottish parliament last month. As hundreds of women gathered to demand the Scottish government comply with the supreme court ruling, tiresome perma-protestor Tom Harlow – a stripper and drag queen who performs as Cabaret Against The Hate Speech and has previously received funding from the Scottish government’s arts quango Creative Scotland – arrived and deployed his usual tactic of blaring music from a portable PA system, drowning out the women who wished to speak about their rights.

For 90 minutes, Harlow – real name Thomas Michael Moncrieff – disrupted the event while police officers did nothing. When Susan Smith approached him to ask him to turn down the volume, he held an umbrella in front of her face. Smith, I regret to inform you, touched the brolly. 

Video and photographs of the umbrella-touching incident are conclusive. Smith did not commit a crime. (There may have been a second brolly toucher but I’m loath to feed conspiracies).

Tom Harlow’s disruption of the feminist rally outside Holyrood went beyond the bounds of free speech. His appeared to be an aggressive protest aimed at silencing others. He succeeded in doing that. The police should have shut him up on the day. Instead, they’re now doing his bidding.

There are clear echoes of the recent Graham Linehan case, where the police appeared to be doing the bidding of a trans activist. That case was eventually dismissed. So, here we go again.

A public backlash against Linehan’s arrest should have marked an end to cops’ indulgence of the long-deployed activist tactic of making spurious complaints and grinding their victims with the process. Instead, as the case of Susan Smith shows, Police Scotland – an organisation hopelessly captured by gender ideologues – remains ready to act as the trans activists’ private militia.