Alister Jack: Nicola Sturgeon and John Swinney should publicly apologise following Supreme Court ruling

Alister Jack has said Nicola Sturgeon and John Swinney should make a public apology to the women who challenged the Scottish Government’s gender reforms in court.  

The former Scottish Secretary said the feminist group For Women Scotland were “vilified” and “demonised” by the former and current first ministers. 

Jack said they were owed an apology in the wake of the UK Supreme Court ruling that under the Equality Act 2010, the terms ‘woman’, ‘man’, and ‘sex’ refer exclusively to biological sex. 

Speaking to ITV Borders, he said: “I feel very strongly that Nicola Sturgeon and John Swinney, who was definitely her partner in crime on this, should apologise to those women who were fighting that case.  

“They were vilified, and they were demonised by Nicola Sturgeon and John Swinney and others in the SNP and that was completely wrong, and they should get a proper public apology. That’s what I think.” 

Jack enacted a section 35 order – a mechanism within the Scotland Act 1998 which blocks legislation passed by the Scottish Government from receiving royal assent if it is deemed to have an adverse effect on the law as it applies to reserved matters – in January 2023. 

He added: “I remember just after I did the section 35 in one of the first interviews Nicola Sturgeon did, she said that the people opposing her legislation were transphobic, homophobic, even racist.  

“Now that didn’t matter to me. I’ve got broad shoulders, I’m a politician, I have to be thick-skinned about these things.  

“But I did think that these women, who were standing up for women’s safe spaces, who were opposing the idea that biological men to pose as women and go into a rape crisis centre or a women’s refuge for women who have been domestically or sexually abused, I thought they were doing absolutely the right thing, those women, and they understood what safe spaces were about.  

“And I think the treatment of them was disgraceful.” 

Earlier today, when asked by members of the media in the Scottish Parliament, Sturgeon said the Supreme Court ruling could make the lives of transgender people “unliveable”. 

She said: “The Supreme Court is the highest judicial authority in the country, so there's no gainsaying that.  

“The question for me, and I think for a lot of people, is how that is now translated into practice? Can that be done in a way that, of course, protects women but also allows trans people to live their lives with dignity and in a safe and accepted way? I think that remains to be seen.  

“I think some of the early indications would raise concerns in my mind that we are at risk of making the likes of trans people almost unliveable, and I don't think the majority of people in the country would want to see that. It certainly doesn't make a single woman any safer to do that, because the threat to women, as I think we all know, comes from predatory and abusive men.”