Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid)10 March 2021
I think that we all welcomed the 2018 act, which is, indeed, the gold standard and something that the Parliament and the Scottish Government can be very proud of. On the specifics, I do not think that we can make quite the same analogy.
16:30However, as I said, after decade after miserable decade of the abuse that every woman in this chamber will have suffered at some time—while it will perhaps have been, in the main, verbal abuse, for some women it will have been more than that, and I would include myself in that category—I think that it is time to try to do something different.
What is proposed here is a working group that is to report within 12 months, which is from an amendment that I proposed and to which the committee agreed in terms of the principle of a time limit being put in place. The working group will look at the misogynistic harassment issue, but it will also look at the issue of a sex aggravator. The group will report to the Parliament, and it will therefore be the Parliament, as the democratic Parliament of our country, that will consider the issues and take decisions.
Colleagues will know that I very much recognise the importance of the principle of the immutability of sexual dimorphism and the importance of not conflating sex and gender, and that I have argued for that in the Parliament and in the committee on the Census (Amendment) (Scotland) Bill, to which my colleague Joan McAlpine referred. I therefore very much recognise the concerns about those issues, but I feel that, having studied the evidence and as a lawyer, the concerns about that debate are becoming part of the debate on the bill before us. I do not necessarily see the two issues as being contemporaneous in that regard.
The Equality Act 2010, which has been mentioned, remains part of the legislation that governs our activities, and we cannot act ultra vires of the 2010 act. Therefore, inserting into the bill before us definitions from the 2010 act and other pieces of legislation seems to me, from a legal perspective, not to make much sense. The Equality Act 2010 is on the statute book and it governs everything that we can do. For the reasons that I have stated, I will not support the amendments in group 1.