Still more Lilliputian was Ms Sturgeon's insistence that none of this should undermine the SNP's "landmark" gender recognition reform bill - "passed overwhelmingly by this house". To no avail, no hint of admission or recognition: he might as well have read the laws of thermodynamics to an aardvark. The previous question was flipped on its head: did the First Minister agree that the rapist who raped two women was, in fact, a man? In the end, Douglas Ross – who doggedly refused to refer to the rapist by his nom-de-guerre of Isla Bryson – resorted to absolute simplicity and produced a piece of paper from which he read the SNP's very own self-ID legislation to the First Minister. Presumably self-ID is being shelved in favour of an elaborate system whereby Nicola personally adjudicates on every case. She didn’t want to get into that case because she "didn’t have enough information about that person’s claim to be a woman". "A rapist should be considered a rapist", said the First Minister in a tone which I suspect she – wrongly – believed to be comforting. It was like watching someone perform root canal treatment on Mr Blobby. There was a stark contrast between Ross’s precision and the preposterousness of what had occurred. ![]() ![]() Scots' Tory leader Douglas Ross began with a coldly accurate rehearsal of the clown logic that led to the SNP’s justice spokesman trying to maintain that a rapist, whose allocation to a women’s prison they later had to reverse, was still, in fact, a woman despite this move. Today, however, the normal mist of petty grievance and proceduralism had lifted to reveal something else: we were in tautological Neverland, a gender wars Brigadoon. The incidentals of sketching the Scottish Parliament are not immediately promising: it has the atmosphere of an inquest in a leisure centre.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |