Scotsman deputy editor Alan Young speak to political correspondent David Bol about the Hate Crime law
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00:00 Hello and welcome to the Scotsman's Daily Bulletin for Wednesday. I'm Alan Young. I
00:14 am Deputy Editor of the Scotsman. I'm joined today by our Deputy Political Editor, David
00:19 Wald, to talk through some of the main stories. Hi, David.
00:23 Morning, Alan. How you doing?
00:25 Good. Let's have a look at the front page first off. And we lead today on the story
00:32 that Hamza Yousaf really can't get away from. We lead on his comments around the forthcoming
00:42 law around misogyny and his admission that trans women would be protected by it. This
00:51 is all tied in to the row over the Hate Crime Act, which we also feature on the front page
00:59 where women, if you remember, were not included and it has only added to the controversy.
01:06 We'll get into that with David in a minute. Also pictured on the front page there are
01:11 the Scots in the Team GB swimming squad ahead of the Paris Olympics. And we also feature
01:19 the news of a new manager for Aberdeen that they have announced at last. But David, there's
01:26 going to be a bit of drama in the Scottish Parliament today. I think we should start
01:31 by saying that this bid by the Tories to repeal the Hate Crime Act is going absolutely nowhere.
01:41 There's no chance that that's going to be voted through. And it's essentially a piece
01:45 of political theatre. But it will still be quite interesting to see if any SNP MPs rebel.
01:52 Yeah, that's right. I mean, like you said, it's not going to be repealed. Most of the
01:58 MSPs in Hollywood support this bill. And there's also problems if it was to be repealed because
02:03 it's consolidated some of the other sort of hate crime legislation. But it is a bit of
02:08 political theatre from the Tories. That's exactly what it is. They have an allocation
02:13 of time in Hollywood, and they've decided to bring this debate to really shine a light
02:17 on what they say is a really bad piece of legislation. It'll be interesting to see even
02:22 if some of the SNP and MSPs don't vote in favour of repealing it, there might be some
02:27 sort of words said or some concerns raised sort of internally of the SNP that could pose
02:33 quite a problem for Hamza Yousafzai Authority. We've obviously been in recess for a couple
02:37 of weeks. So there's not been a forum at Hollywood to sort of talk a lot of this out since it
02:41 launched on the 1st of April. So it's really the first big chance for a big, quiet, over-the-top
02:48 probably debate about it in Hollywood.
02:50 Indeed, and apologies for saying MPs there. I think I've caused you to do the same. So
02:56 of course MSPs in the Scottish Parliament. So talk us through the misogyny law, which
03:02 is what we lead on today. It's all wrapped up together, isn't it?
03:06 Yeah, it's basically the same people shouting about the same concerns on this, because the
03:11 Hate Crime Act, there's been so many different problems pointed out by critics, but one of
03:17 the original problems, other than the free speech and the other things we've discussed
03:21 it in great length, is the fact that the sex characteristic was left out of that as an
03:27 aggravator. There's one for age, disability, transgender and other sort of characteristics,
03:34 but not sex, because a review found that that needed its own law to tackle misogyny. So
03:41 it's basically seen this piece of legislation, the Hate Crime Act, isn't enough to sort of
03:46 embed that problem. So we'll do that. But that hasn't come forward yet. There are sort
03:52 of initial plans. So the Misogyny Act was kind of seen as quieting some of the criticism
04:02 that sex was not included in that. But yesterday, Hamza Yousaf was asked about whether trans
04:07 women would be included in that. And I don't think particularly surprisingly, he said that
04:12 they would, basically saying that they can face misogyny, trans women, and it's basically
04:18 that perception of the offender. But it's obviously lit a lot of this controversy again,
04:24 and upset from people who essentially don't believe that trans women are women and deserve
04:30 that same protection.
04:32 And just more widely on the Hate Crime Act, then. So there was a lot of noise about it.
04:38 We're two weeks in now, but we've got updated stats yesterday on how many reports are actually
04:44 coming in to Police Scotland.
04:45 Yeah, I mean, we had a huge surge in the first week, there were thousands, and we kind of
04:51 expected that to be the case. This week, we've seen the second week, it's dropped by 75%.
04:57 It's almost fallen off a cliff. There was obviously a lot of initial interest, whether
05:00 there was a lot of vexatious complaints in the first week that people just weren't bothering
05:05 with. But it does just show that that initial rush has kind of depleted a little bit. But
05:10 the concerns haven't really gone away. And hence why we're going to see this debate at
05:14 Holyrood today.
05:15 Indeed, indeed. What time does it kick off?
05:18 This afternoon, it's about half past two-ish, I think.
05:21 Right. Thanks very much, David. We'll of course be covering that at scottsman.com throughout
05:27 the day and in tomorrow's paper. If you're on the site, please do subscribe if you can,
05:32 then you will not miss a thing. And if you're out and about today, please do pick up a copy
05:37 of the paper from me and from David. Bye for now.
05:39 [Music]
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