BY IAN MITCHELL

Who’s to blame for making it possible for rapists to be incarcerated in women’s prisons in Scotland?

Those of us who retained the will to live after the media storm over “the rapist”, Isla Bryson, being sent to a women’s prison while still physically equipped for further raping, will want to know what caused the unexpected eruption of anger with the transgender policies of Nicola Sturgeon. Was the Scottish government warned that such an outcome was a possibility? To what extent is Nicola Sturgeon to blame?

My new biography of Ms Sturgeon relies primarily on the Official Report of the parliament (Scotland’s Hansard), and that is where I went to discover what the record reveals of discussions before the Bill was presented to parliament. Most importantly, I read the evidence presented to the Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee, which examined the proposed measure.

The Committee is chaired by Joe Fitzpatrick, an openly LBGT MSP who started life working for the Forestry Commission—though whether or not he was actually “a lumberjack” I have not been able to establish. He was disgraced in December 2020 when he was sacked as Minister for Public Health, Sport and Wellbeing due to the record high drug deaths reported in Scotland that year, which was five times the rate in England and twenty-five times the EU average. His consolation prize, so to speak, was chairmanship of this committee.

The most important witness that the committee examined, at least in terms of government status, was Shona Robison, the English-born Cabinet Secretary (Minister) for Social Justice. She was by now the promoter of the Bill, though she had not been the initiator, as that happened before she was appointed to the role. Robison was examined on 28 June 2022. The most important thing the Minister said was this:

“Violence against women and girls emanates from predatory men and there is no evidence that predatory men feel the need to try to obtain a gender recognition certificate in order to be predatory and abusive.”

This is the problem with the bureaucratic mindset. “There is no evidence…” That is a machine thinking. A human being would accept that innovation is possible. Putting men dressed as women in women’s prisons has been the policy of the Scottish Prison Service for many years, where appropriate. What was new last month was that, since Sturgeon muscled the Gender Recognition Reform Bill through parliament, it was arguably legal for decisions on gender to be taken by the person concerned. No medical or psychologist’s judgements are required, whereas previously that was mandatory before changing gender.

Criminals tend to be more imaginative individuals than government ministers so, after conviction for two rapes, and knowing that Sturgeon’s new Bill had been passed by Holyrood, Adam Graham bought a bra and became Isla Bryson. He or she then asked to be imprisoned with 300 women on the basis of his own declaration that he was now a she.

This was not a one-off. Soon afterwards, Andrew Burns became Tiffany Scott and asked to be moved to a women’s prison. He had a record of stalking young girls, violence against fellow convicts and self-harm to the point of attempted suicide. He had already been moved into segregation while in a male prison near Glasgow. Bryson was not a “black swan event”. There could be many more. More likely he was an illustration of the flexibility and resourcefulness of the average criminal when faced with the prospect of many years locked up with their own sort.

Shona Robison compounded the problem by telling the committee that there were 16 transgender prisoners already in custody, and that the Bill “will not change the way that Scottish prisons accommodate the people in their care (sic).” Six months later, Isla Bryson did just that, putting so-called “bad-faith actors” on the map (i.e. the main TV news).

Talking about the experience of prison services abroad, where everyone is always wiser and more rational than in Tory Britain according to all Nationalists, Robison said, “The international evidence that has emerged shows that there is no evidence of changes in laws being misused by what you described as ‘bad-faith actors’. The evidence of the Scottish Human Rights Commission is very strong on that: it could find no evidence of the misuse of the process.”

The wooden-headed roboticism of the bureaucratic mindset was illustrated immediately after the statement just quoted, when the Minister said, “There are quite hefty penalties for misuse [of the self-ID process]. As I set out in my opening remarks, someone who makes a false declaration will feel the full force of the law.”

So a double-rapist is supposed to be so worried about making a false declaration that he will not try to serve his sentence, which could be up to 10 or 15 years, in the more congenial society offered by a women’s prison? Tell that to the Marines! That is the level of unreality you get when bureaucrats do not get out of the office enough.

For a country to be run by such people is bad enough, but it is far worse if the First Minister takes seriously the views of woolly-headed, paint-by-numbers bureaucratic-minded politicians with an imagination deficit. Robison’s point right throughout the evidence session was, in effect, that because something has not happened before it will never happen. The Minister is perhaps too young to remember when people said the same about heavier-than-air flight. But new stuff happens all the time, despite the best efforts of bureaucracies the world over to stifle innovation and experiment. There was “no evidence” of this article before I wrote it.

It seems to me that the First Minister of Scotland must take a large share of the blame for appointing people like Ms Robison to positions in which imagination is needed as much as party loyalty. Hating Tories is not enough.

Ian Mitchell is the author of Hating Tories: How Nicola Sturgeon Got into Government (2023). Like this article, its main source is the Official Report of the Scottish parliament. The title can be accessed on Amazon here.