Act has not quelled hatred but instead fanned the flames - Sue Webber

If anyone wants to know why Humza Yousaf’s Hate Crime Act has been an unmitigated disaster, they should speak to the women who attended the Let Women Speak event, pictured, at The Mound last weekend.

Protestors take part in the Let Women Speak rally following the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act coming into force, outside The Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh on Saturday, April 6, 2024. (Picture: Jane Barlow/PA Wire)

The gathering was supposed to give women a public platform to tell others about their experiences in an increasingly polarised and febrile debate over gender identity, but what transpired was an appalling example of how the atmosphere created by the SNP-Green government has turned Scotland into an intolerably intimidating place for women to speak their minds. In seeking to quell hatred, Humza Yousaf and his predecessor Nicola Sturgeon have instead fanned the flames.

Rather than protecting the women – and I have heard this from several sources − police officers allowed counter demonstrators, mainly men in masks, to surround them on three sides with their backs against the Royal Scottish Academy. The men used megaphones to bellow insults, blew whistles and set off a siren so the women could not be heard. Disgusting homophobic, anti-women placards – you can see them on social media – were waved in their faces. Police only left one narrow way in and out, and those women who gave up trying to listen, or were just plain scared, had to run a gauntlet of hate to depart. The lack of a buffer zone to protect them was an utter disgrace.

Apart from facilitate intimidation and move on a woman filming the abusers, the police did nothing. Why? Because they didn’t want to arrest anyone, one woman was told.

This is the Scotland Humza Yousaf and his cronies have created, where women can’t gather to share their experiences, where vicious, masked men can abuse them with impunity, and where Green Party politicians who call themselves feminists revel in the toxic, intimidating atmosphere they are fomenting.

Last week I attended a Scottish Feminist Network meeting and heard from women genuinely fearful about speaking out on gender. They are discussing with their families what might happen if the police turn up, about not taking a mobile phone to a police station in case it is seized, but writing a number on their arm they can call if arrested. Ordinary, warm women, petrified by the Scottish state. The Act has not tackled hate but facilitated its promotion, and provisions to protect free expression are perversely allowing for its destruction. The road to hell is paved with good intentions and the Hate Crime Act is yet another stone laid by the SNP.

Sue Webber is a Lothian Scottish Conservative MSP