The Right to Protest is a fundamental part of any democracy. As has been graphically illustrated by the horrendous scenes in Myanmar, it is one of the first things dictatorships clamp down on. In the last week I have had many emails from constituents concerned about the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill which received its second reading in the House of Commons on Tuesday. Part 3 of the Bill contains enhanced police powers to deal with public order and wider offences and increased sentences for breaching conditions imposed on assemblies and processions by the police. 

The changes to the law on the right to protest will only have force in England and Wales but they will impact upon people living in Scotland. There is a long tradition of Scots travelling to London to protest. In my twenties I frequently endured overnight bus journeys to London to protest cuts to student support, nuclear weapons, and Section 28. More recently Scots travelled in their droves to London to protest against Brexit at huge demonstrations. 

Yesterday Westminster held its annual International Women’s Day (IWD) debate. Squeezed into three hours at the end of the parliamentary week, after the budget debates, it felt rather marginalised. Yet in a week which saw the abduction and suspected murder of a young woman on the streets of London the discussion of the unique problems women face in our society could hardly have been more timely.  
 
Every year, the Labour MP, Jess Phillips, reads out the names of the women killed by men across the UK since the last IWD debate. This year she read out the name of Sarah Everard. 

The statistics which Jess uses come from the work of English feminist Karen Ingala Smith and her Counting Dead Women project which records the lives of women murdered by men in the UK. This project has inspired the Femicide Census which is a unique source of information about women who have been killed by men in the UK and the men who have killed them. 

The budget turned out to be a bit of a damp squib because so much of it had been trailed already. The Secretary of State for Business, Kwasi Kwarteng, managed to put his foot in it with the PM by admitting that Indyref2 should be up to the Scots, then, not content with that he also blew the gaffe on the furlough extension. Much of the rest of Dishi Rishi’s plans including the “revolutionary” rise in corporation tax were carefully and deliberately leaked. 

The Chancellor should be judged by his deeds not his words or his hype. Some of his deeds may yet come back to haunt him. When the post-pandemic public inquiry takes place one key area of focus will be why the UK Government decided not to go for a circuit breaker last Autumn. I understand that Sunak was highly influential in persuading Johnson not to do so. 

For all the fanfare what is singularly missing from this budget is the sort of economic boost that President Biden is going for in the states in order to generate an investment led recovery. 

When Liam Fox stood up in the House of Commons this week and said that the ongoing controversy around the Holyrood Committee on the Scottish Government’s handling of Harassment complaints was threatening to “bring politics in the UK into international disrepute”, it was hard not to laugh. Liam Fox is a former Minister in a government which unlawfully prorogued parliament and threatened to break international law in order to get its own way. On that basis he and his Tory mates have done a pretty good job of bringing politics in the UK into international disrepute already. 

Having regard to the farce that played out over Brexit, the litany of political chicanery and the disregard for the Rule of Law under Boris Johnson’s premiership, it would be easy just to say that Scotland will take no lectures from Westminster and leave it at that. But that would not be honest or candid.