Exclusive:SNP Government's 'failure to protect women is a political choice'
MSP Ash Regan accused the Scottish Government of a “betrayal” of women and girls after delays to anti-misogyny legislation
The Scottish Government has “betrayed women and girls” by failing to progress legislation designed to protect them, an opposition MSP has claimed.
Last year, the SNP administration said the protected characteristic of “sex” would be added to the Hate Crime Act.
The pledge came after plans for a standalone law against misogyny was dropped.
Yet moves to update the legislation have stalled with no clear timeline from the government as to when the change will be made.
Ash Regan MSP, who sits as an independent, described the delay as a deliberate political decision rather than a technical oversight.
“Women were told they would be protected, yet sex remains excluded from the Hate Crime Act years later, and after the promise of a stronger, standalone misogyny law was quietly dropped,” Ms Regan said.
She added: “The failure to lay the promised statutory instrument to at least include sex in the existing, albeit flawed, Act will surprise no woman who has paid attention to how laws and policy have treated women and girls over the past decade.
“This is not a technical delay; it is a political choice.”
In May last year, the Scottish Government confirmed it would not bring forward promised planned legislation to criminalise misogyny before the Holyrood election.
The new misogyny law was promised after findings from an expert group in 2022, led by Baroness Helena Kennedy, preferred separate legislation to incorporating abuse and violence against women into the existing Hate Crime Act.
Ministers said the bill would take too long to draw up following the Supreme Court judgment on the definition in law of “woman”.
Instead, they said existing legislation would be amended to provide protections on the basis of sex.
This was promised for September but is now more than four months late.
Ms Regan warned that women are increasingly facing self-censorship in public life, while remaining excluded from equal legal protection.
“Women remain exposed to chilling self-censorship through Non-Crime Hate Incidents, while protection is withheld,” she said.
“Cancel culture enforced by process is not justice, and it critically does not meet our human rights obligations for women and girls.”
She argued the government’s failure to lay the relevant Scottish Statutory Instrument (SSI) must be viewed as part of a wider pattern in which women’s rights are treated as conditional.
“When apparently disconnected actions and inactions are connected, a familiar pattern emerges,” Ms Regan said.
“Women’s rights are recognised only where they are simultaneously extended to men who self-identify as women.
“The implications of that approach for safety, dignity and privacy are obvious.
“Many Scottish women are increasingly concluding that, in the eyes of this Government, it has become ‘no men, no rights’ when it comes to women and girls.”
Ms Regan also criticised what she called a flawed policy-making culture at Holyrood.
“Successive governments have outsourced critical thinking to a closed, circular economy of publicly funded lobby groups with privileged access to decision-makers,” she said.
“Some organisations that claim to speak for women seem obsessed with seeking to redefine women beyond the legal and biological meaning of adult human female.
Why the same groups whose advice has resulted in legal confusion, reputational harm and mounting public cost are still granted disproportionate influence over law and policy is simply mind-blowing.
“Why are we continuing to fund failure?”
A spokesperson for the Scottish Government said: “The Scottish Government is currently considering responses to the public consultation on the draft SSI to add the characteristic of sex to the Hate Crime and Public Order Act which we undertook last year.”
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