Rishi Sunak slams Scotland’s Hate Crime Act

Scotland’s Hate Crime Act has got off to a rather rocky start, to put it mildly. On Monday, when the bill came into force, renowned author JK Rowling took to Twitter to reiterate her concerns about how expressing gender critical views (namely, that biological sex is a reality) could be an offence under the new bill. Cue the pile on. And now even the Prime Minister has waded into the row.

Taking Rowling’s side, Rishi Sunak proclaimed last night that ‘people should not be criminalised for stating simple facts on biology’ while a government source told the Mail that with the bill comes the ‘potential for seriously chilling effects on free speech’. The PM’s intervention followed Rowling’s powerful Twitter tirade, where she posted a thread of trans women, referring to them at first as women before declaring: ‘April fools! Only kidding. Obviously, the people mentioned in the above tweets aren’t women at all, but men, every last one of them.