Government response to losing in court (again) over trans prisoners exemplies how SNP Scotland operates

First, the good news. On Friday, one of Scotland’s top judges, Lady Ross, ruled in favour of For Women Scotland, concluding the Scottish government’s prisons policy is unlawful.

The Scottish Prison Service (SPS) has allowed male criminals – including murderers – to be housed in the female prison estate if they claim a female ‘identity’ and have been magically assessed as posing no risk to women.

The judgment against this was predictable for two reasons. First, it is dangerously insane.

It’s impossible to predict which men pose harm to women. That’s why single-sex spaces exist in the first place.

Second, John Swinney and his ministers already lost to FWS at the UK Supreme Court in April 2025. Women’s sex-based rights were finally reconfirmed last year after a decades-long, all-out assault.

But – ever the sorest of losers and intransigent of ostriches – the SNP insisted putting male criminals in the female prison estate was still permissible. It isn’t, and all but the criminally ignorant already knew it never was.

You’d be forgiving for assuming our political leaders - with dutiful humility – will now urgently seek to rectify their appalling wrongs. That they’d made a contingency plan for this very likely outcome?

Otherwise, we’d have to conclude they think the judiciary irrelevant. We’d be witnessing a fundamental breakdown in the rule of law.

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The bad news: this is SNP Scotland.

Within minutes of Lady Ross’s ruling being published, Scottish Prison Service Chief Executive, Linda Pollock, released a statement telling staff to effectively hang tight; the policy would remain in place while they “carefully consider” the judgment.

Could there be a starker illustration of the SNP’s consequence-free approach to legal wrongdoing? Should it not be clear enough: our government has permitted a fundamental human rights violation to occur against society’s most disenfranchised women.

Tired ‘complex’ line trotted out

No apologies here: not to FWS, to the women they’ve harmed, to taxpayers for spending their cash defending a cruel absurdity. And no urgency whatsoever. John Swinney, in the tired tone of someone who barely thinks this matters, trotted out the practised line the ruling is “complex”.

We cannot have this merry-go-round of denial, obfuscation, and delay again. As with last year’s Supreme Court judgment, Lady Ross’s bright white line conclusions are understandable by a competent teenager.

It’s time we saw consequences. A crucial first step would be the removal of Linda Pollock from public office.

A playpen of taxpayer-funded insanity made up of government and its executive agencies, in hock to unaccountable “charities” - which exist almost solely on grants from government, such as the Equality Network and LGBT Youth Scotland - has been permitted to have undue influence over government policy.

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Scottish Trans, who aggressively pushed for full self-ID in the prison service, have spent the weekend fearmongering disgracefully about likely suicides following the judgment. Those awful women prisoners, it’s insinuated. They’re so unwilling to give up their rights they’ll push males to do violence to themselves. What grotesque manipulation.

With zero leadership, or even a hint of recognition women’s rights matter, either from the government, the SPS leadership, or these lobbyists, the worst, most frightening and abusive trans activists have exploded with characteristic rage, some decrying FWS as “terrorists”.

I write this on what is FWS’s eighth birthday. Eight years battling something they never should have had to. All while civic Scotland sat on its hands or contributed to the problem, treating completely ordinary views as verboten, and gender identity ideology as mandatory.

Credibility litmus test

I tire of saying it: how leaders have dealt with this issue is a litmus test for their credibility.

That’s all leaders, not just political ones. Actually understanding the full reality of what has happened, both in law, and the real-world harm that’s been permitted to upturn lives because of it, remains under-explored in the very places it needs a good airing.

We see nothing but a timid tiptoe towards this from the Edinburgh International Book Festival this year, for example.

One event featuring lawyers will discuss ‘When Rights Collide,’ in a panel about last year’s SC ruling. While at least something, it’s a further snub to the many female authors who have written extensively – in the most hostile literary environment I’ve ever known - on what is far from solely a legal matter.

And, in true SNP-Scotland style, this event is presented as if women’s rights are still up for debate. They’re not. We won them back. There was no “collision” of rights. There was theft. There was violation.

There was public outcry against the EIBF last year when myself and the editors of the Sunday Times bestselling anthology The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht were shunned by the festival’s programmers. Director Jenny Niven told the BBC’s Samira Ahmed this was because we did not “progress this conversation in a respectful or meaningful way”.

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I covet the days when it’s no longer demanded women be “respectful” in the face of attack. When it’s recognised women’s courage in the face of such has meaning. But our cultural leaders have failed as badly as our political ones. I often wonder if “shuns responsibility” is an essential skill listed on advertisements for SNP Scotland leadership roles.

It’s 200 years since Elizabeth Fry won the battle for single-sex prison accommodation for women in Britain. It’s the definition of being on “the wrong side of history” that the SNP, presiding atop a complacent civic Scotland, forced Scottish women to repeat that fight.

A reckoning will come; the madness will end someday. But, in the meantime, on their eight-year anniversary, I wish For Women Scotland’s Trina Budge, Susan Smith, and Marion Calder, a quieter life than they’ve been afforded this past near-decade.