Unbuyable Bill may result in just 25 charges a year
Ms Regan, a former SNP justice minister who defected to Alba in 2023, wants Scotland to bring in what is known as the Nordic Model - a system which criminalises the buying of sex in any setting and de-criminalises people selling sex. Since 2007 the buying of sex in a public place has been a criminal offence in Scotland.
Formally called The Prostitution (Offences and Support) (Scotland) Bill Ms Regan's legislation would also quash historic convictions for prostitution and provide sex workers a legal right to financial support to leave prostitution.
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What is the Nordic Model? The proposals to criminalise 'buyers' of sex
Ash Regan claims MSPs are buying sex as she introduces new bill
The Alba MSP - who has the backing of Alba leader and former justice secretary Kenny MacAskill - argues prostitution is a form of male violence against women and that sex work exploits vulnerable women who are forced into it as a result of poverty.
She argues her bill is a bold and long-overdue step towards tackling the issue but has said she fears it could be voted down by male MSPs in Holyrood who use prostitutes.
It has already prompted significant debate with sex workers launching a campaign against it arguing it would make them more vulnerable to attack.
The financial memorandum published with the bill estimated that the annual recurring cost associated with measures in the bill, taking into account extra work for the police, the prosecution service and the Scottish Prison Service as well as financial support for people leaving prostitution would be between £1.4 million and £2.2 million.
This was based on estimates of the number of new charges brought to court of between 25 and 75 a year.
"The member is basing total cost estimates on 45, 90 and 135 additional recorded crimes and 25, 50 and 75 additional charges brought to court," the financial memorandum stated.
Lynsey Walton, chief executive of National Ugly Mugs, the UK's national sex worker safety charity, said: 'Ash Regan is trying to have it both ways.
"In public she claims that the Nordic Model is needed to stop a national epidemic of abuse, but privately she admits that changing the law would lead to only a handful of cases a year," she said.
'Sex worker groups, alongside Non Governmental Organisations like Amnesty and the World Health Organisation oppose the new law on the grounds that it will make life more difficult and dangerous for sex workers, while costing taxpayers millions of pounds a year to enforce."
She added: "If we truly want to address systemic violence against sex workers, we need full decriminalisation, not another expensive, performative policy that protects no one.
"An official government review of similar legislation in Northern Ireland – the only nation in the UK to enact the Nordic Model – found that there was 'no evidence that the offence of purchasing sexual services has produced a downward pressure on the demand for, or supply of, sexual services'. It also found that 'the legislation has contributed to a climate whereby sex workers feel further marginalised and stigmatised'.
A YouGov poll of 1,088 Scottish adults, carried out last year, showed that Scots firmly oppose the Nordic Model, with 47% saying it should be legal for a person to pay someone to have sex with them, versus 32% who think it should not be legal.
The poll showed that 69% of Scots say MSPs should focus on protecting the health and safety of sex workers, and providing support to people who want to leave the industry, compared to just 14% who support new laws to prevent people exchanging sexual services for money.
A spokesperson for Ash Regan said: 'Police Scotland does not routinely record the cost for any specific operation as officers are deployed to where local policing plans necessitate their services are most required.
'If the Bill becomes law then it will be an operational matter for Police Scotland to enforce the new law and Ash has full confidence in their ability to do so."
She added: "Previous Members Bills have provided no financial support for Officer Training whereas Ash Regan's Bill has prudently set out costs to support training requirements of existing police officers. The manner in which the figures have been presented is either a wilful or ignorant representation of how training needs are facilitated in an organisation."
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Daily Mail
33 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Booze, wood-burners, Sunday roasts... as the list of everyday pleasures targeted by the SNP grows longer, have we EVER been subjected to a more censorious nanny state government?
They've clobbered smokers. Thought – aloud – about criminalising the ownership of cats. Its Fife panjandrums are now leaning on local chippies to slash portion-sizes – in the averred interests of public health: now, SNP surrogates threaten your Sunday roast. The ink had barely dried on the first Scottish Parliament minutes before that first cohort of MSPs had banned fox-hunting and hare-coursing. Passed a whole Act about dog-fouling. Our underemployed, overwaged legislators are still after anyone gasping for a fag - in the latest wheeze, you can now be prosecuted for puffing within fifteen metres of a hospital boundary, even if you are on the other side of the street. Disposable vapes are in their sights too: for years it has been an offence to vape at any Scottish railway station, even on a platform in the open air. No pleasure seems safe from the Nats, from their fatuous efforts to police football chants – indeed, the initial law was so intrusive, and so unworkable, it had to be abandoned. Forget that soothing drink, by the way. 'Minimum pricing,' whacked up again last year, means you're now shelling out more for a litre of sherry than, back in 1999, you had to hand over for a bottle of Famous Grouse. Our English neighbours enjoy cheaper beer than we do. And now the Nats have a real new beef with us. The Scottish Government's Climate Change Committee, wagging a sententious finger, says we should all be eating 30 per cent less red meat. And that farmers – as if they did not have trials enough, with scant profit-margins and over-weening bureaucracy in one of Scotland's loneliest jobs – should rear a third fewer sheep and cattle. Even that shocker has had to jostle for attention with other ridiculous headlines. NHS Fife, for instance, is leaning on the hot takeaway trade to cut the typical portion of, for instance, fish and chips. And the Scottish Animal Welfare Commission suddenly has anglers in its crosshairs. Fishing practices should be reformed, it drones, as fish are 'sentient beings' with 'emotional experiences that matter to them.' It hopes ministers will soon review the law regarding 'actions that occur in the normal course of fishing.' Such a move, panted one newspaper and as if it had just unmasked Lord Lucan, 'could outlaw many aspects of angling such as hooking a fish and removing it from the water.' SAWC does, admittedly, have form. Only in February, it thought about forbidding cat ownership in parts of the country where there was demonstrable predation on birds and small mammals. It would make still more sense to shoot every last bird of prey out of the sky and, if SAWC wants a rough guide, between 1837 and 1840 gamekeepers in forested Invergarry killed 285 common buzzards, 63 goshawks, 27 white-tailed sea eagles, 15 golden eagles and 18 ospreys. Not to mention six gyrfalcons, eleven hobbies, 275 kites, 371 rough-legged buzzards, 462 kes-trels, 78 merlins, 63 hen harriers and seven orange-legged falcons. The First Minister, of less stern stuff, limply assured the public that the SNP administration had no plans to ban pet cats. Last year, too, the Nationalists were even forced to abandon a crazed scheme to ban wood-burning stoves in new-build houses. It feels increasingly as if you cannot take three strides in what one of John Swinney's predecessors once hailed as 'the best small country in the world' without being lectured, harangued, re-proached and disapproved of. Tobacco, sugar, booze, salmon or that jumbo-sausage supper… ministers have their beady little eyes on us. And, no doubt, others have eyes on them too. It is only fair to point out that this culture of censure, rebuke and righteously rapped knuckles long predates the SNP's 2007 ascent to power. From practically the start, the devolved new Scotland rapidly won much wry comment for eat-your-vegetables nanny statism. After the first MSPs had solemnly voted themselves a com-memorative medal. In 2005, for instance, Nora Radcliffe – Liberal Democrat MSP for Gordon, till Alex Salmond toppled her from obscurity into oblivion – called for a ban on the boiling of live lobsters. The Scottish Executive, as it then was, pelted us with posters and raucous TV ads about the horrors of everything from eating too many crisps, through dodgy electric blankets, to the enormity of consigning your Christmas turkey to the fridge before it was completely cold. And, in April 2006 and to widespread trepidation – many journalists hurried up from England, hoping for riots on the streets – Jack McConnell's administration banned smoking in enclosed public spaces. A policy, in fact, first suggested by a Nationalist MSP, Stewart Maxwell. But Scots submitted to it so meekly that one wonders how much it emboldened another First Minister, fourteen years later, to impose all sorts of ridiculous restrictions on our liberties during Covid. At its height, you could not sit down on a park bench, enjoy coffee with a neighbour in your garden or leave your house more than once a day. It was even decreed an offence to venture beyond the bounds of your own local authority. When I in March 2021 had briefly to scamper back to my Hebridean lair, by deserted roads through silent towns, for an armful of Astra-Zeneca, I was so terrified of being stopped and challenged I carried a sort of letter-of-transit from my GP. Meanwhile, our unfortunate children shuffled down school corridors in sweaty masks as – concerned about classroom ventilation – ministers wondered aloud about sawing the bottoms off doors and Nicola Sturgeon tut-tutted that Prince William dared to visit Scotland. Behind this are two dark realities. The first is that, while finally responsible for a host of public services, the Scottish Government (and, by extension, the Scottish Parliament) delivers virtually none of them. Local authorities school most of our children; local health-boards direct primary care and hospitals, and so on. When it finally did have an immediate and grave responsibility, from the dawn of 2021 – vaccinating the elderly and the vulnerable against coronavirus – the Scottish Government made such a laboured fist of things that, quietly and with the deepest tact, Whitehall sent in the army. The second reality is that there is a very old middle-class tradition in Scotland of censuring working-class pleasures. In an era when, for most ordinary people, Sunday was their only day off, clergy insisted on the shuttering of galleries and museums. In a noted Court of Session case – with consequences, generations later, for the Western Isles – it was finally ruled that the good and respectable folk of Burntisland, most conscious of their goodness and respectability, could not ban the Sabbath visits of excursion steamers. In 1875 the Religion and Morals Report for the Free Church General Assembly railed that, to a large extent, 'our farm servants are ignorant, licentious, profane and rude'. What yokels might have thought of Free Church ministers is not recorded. Meanwhile, Presbyterians grew so obsessed with the demon drink that, by the Great War, many congregations celebrated Communion with non-alcoholic wine. And, in 1907, a United Free Church minister assailed a new social phenomenon as 'perfect iniquities of Hell itself,' capped in Glasgow Corporation's 1909 roar about 'the great and increasing evil' it was doing to the city's young men and women. Business ventures 'owned by 'aliens and Roman Catholics,' touting an unnecessary product 'epitomising,' gasped one gentleman, 'the evil of luxury being smuggled into the souls of Glaswegians.' The target of such ire? Italian ice cream cafés. As if not to be outdone, the Free Presbyterian Magazine warned young Highland lasses, seeking urban employment, of the perils of the white-slave trade. They should not, for instance, accept sweets from strangers. Retreating from such past larks to the latest decrees from those with the rule over us, it is striking how few stand up to logical examination. Take the Scottish Climate Committee's clamour for less beef and fewer cows; the reduced bleating of sheep. This is presumably pegged to three core tenets of tree-hugging faith: that reduced upland grazing will in scant decades see the regeneration of much Scottish forest; that cattle-feed is a wildly inefficient use of grain; and that cows, naturally flatulent, are responsible for about 14.5 per cent of global greenhouse gases. The precise figure is, in fact, disputed. But the Committee's lordly loftiness flies in the face of basic realities. For one, about 65 per cent of all the land in Britain can bear nothing but grass. Cows and sheep – hold the front page – eat grass. We cannot. Our cloven-hooved stock will, accordingly, be an essential part of our food economy till the end of time, and the beef industry in particular has for years been working hard to reduce its carbon footprint. For another, much of upland and coastal Scotland is too high – or too exposed to salted winds – to bear significant woodland. 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It is estimated that dung beetles save farmers in the UK £367 million per year…' Then we have that NHS Fife obsession: how big is your fish supper? In fact, fish and chips – cooked properly and well – is a remarkably healthy meal. There is, for instance, no added sugar. It is rich in Omega-3 fatty acids, vitamins B12 and D, and high-quality protein – and less fat than a typical serving of, say, chicken tikka masala or an oil-slicked Chinese takeaway. 'Typically,' assures one authority, 'fish and chips on average have 9.42 grams of fat per 100 grams, while the average pizza has 11, chicken korma 15.5 and a donner kebab a whopping 16.2…' We come to SWAC's vapourings about angling. One rather doubts such solicitude extends to every creature of the earth. Even the Commission's august personages doubtless prefer life without headlice, tapeworms and rats and most, presumably, vaccinate their children. It remains official NatureScot advice to smash dead any American signal crayfish you meet in our fresh waters and, for over two decades, it has been determinedly exterminating feral mink in the Western Isles. Where SWAC may have a point is the dubious practice of 'catch and release.' My own view is that you should only venture out with the rod for fish you can eat and, having caught your salmon and thumped it on the head, you head for home and the deep freeze, rather than hauling in fish after fish, weighing them, measuring them, taking a few snaps for social media and then returning them to the deep. Not forgetting a protracted chat about emotional experiences that really mattered to them. But, in coarse fishing, catch and release is the whole point: we might, perhaps, command barbless hooks, or even the soluble sort decreed in the pursuit of bluefin tuna. The wild Atlantic salmon may not always be with us; the typical Scottish political animal will add to the gaiety of nations for decades to come. Bossy, virtue-signalling, carefully picking its targets, and unconsciously living what Ronald Reagan once mocked as the prevalent tenets in modern statecraft. If it moves, tax it; if it keeps moving, regulate it – and, if it stops moving, subsidise it.
Daily Mail
41 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
JIM SILLARS: SNP settled for mediocrity and paid the price with this result
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Daily Mail
41 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
TOM HARRIS: A sigh of relief for Anas - but don't be fooled by Farage's failure to win
It is easy to see why the SNP often underestimates its traditional opponents in the Scottish Labour Party. But after Thursday's spectacular result in the Hamilton by-election, John Swinney 's party would be well advised not to repeat this strategic blunder. The smiles of Labour's victorious campaign team, including its new MSP, Davy Russell, were all too genuine, if tinged by an element of relief. Anas Sarwar's party, after all, had been written off in this contest, not least by the First Minister himself, who repeatedly warned voters that the by-election was a two-horse race between the SNP and Nigel Farage 's insurgent party, Reform UK. But if there was such a two-horse race between those two parties, it was for second and third place. Labour's victory will inject some much-needed confidence into its campaign to unseat the SNP at Holyrood next May, an effort that was looking increasingly forlorn as Keir Starmer 's one-year-old Labour administration at Westminster became ever more unpopular. But there is again a spring in Mr Sarwar's step this weekend, just as an ominous dark cloud has appeared over the head of John Swinney. The nationalists ought to have seen this coming. The late Christine McKelvie, whose sad, premature death caused the by-election in a seat she first won in 2011, was a popular figure in her party and in her Hamilton, Larkhall & Stonehouse constituency. But world-weary strategists of any party know only too well that voters' sympathy for the loss of an MP or MSP, however sincerely felt, rarely translates into votes. The SNP's shameful record in government at Holyrood for the last 18 years played a much greater role in voters' judgment. And that does not bode well for Mr Swinney as polling day next May draws nearer. Expect Scottish Labour to remind Scots at every opportunity, in the next year, of the ever-lengthening catalogue of SNP policy failures, from historically-high NHS waiting lists to dodgy ferry contracts, from the fall in Scotland's international reputation on education to its disgraceful record on drug deaths. The result in Hamilton has boosted Scottish Labour's self-belief that it might actually draw the SNP's long hegemony finally to a close. But as the two traditional political enemies warily circle each other, firing insults and defending their own records, Thursday's third placed party demands some attention of its own. Who could have predicted, even a year ago, that a brand new party that scraped barely seven per cent of Scots' votes at the general election would come within five per centage points and 1,500 votes of taking a seat in Labour's former working class heartland? Aside from Labour's electoral resilience, the core message from Lanarkshire this week has been that there is, after all, an opportunity for a right-wing alternative to the SNP-Labour duopoly to attract the support of disillusioned and fed-up Scots. That will be frustrating to the Scottish Conservatives and its new leader, Russell Findlay, who, despite consistently and effectively holding the SNP government to account week after week at Holyrood, failed to tun that into votes in Thursday's by-election. Nigel Farage isn't exactly a new arrival on the political scene; most people hold strong views about him, one way or the other. To say that he is a divisive figure is like saying Donald Trump might not be everyone's cup of tea. But his party, Reform UK, looks likely to set the heather alight, even in left-wing, right-on Scotland. That there has always been a large section of the electorate who didn't buy into the high-immigration, high-tax, progressive vision of Scotland has never quite been proved, partly because of the reluctance of such people to vote for the Conservatives. Polling evidence suggested Scottish attitudes to immigration were little different from those in the rest of the UK, but that did little to dent Scotland's reputation as an exceptionalist haven of moderation and tolerance. Now voters have been offered an electoral alternative to the Tories, and with it the chance to disrupt the cosy consensus that has prevailed north of the border since devolution was born. Will they take it? The Scottish parliament elections will not be like a by-election, where the eventual winner can have little impact on how Scotland is governed. Will Scots really place their trust in – and their crosses against – Reform candidates? What is fascinating about the Hamilton result – and for the SNP, chilling – is that while Reform came from nowhere, and where Labour's vote since 2021 dropped by just two per cent, the SNP saw its support slump by nearly 17 per cent, much of that, we must assume, going to Reform. The establishment parties should avoid being lulled into a false sense of security by Reform's failure to win on Thursday. There's a new player in town and if it's still around by next May, the consequences for both Labour and the SNP could prove devastating. And entertaining.
