UK government is not blocking Scotland gender reform bill lightly - minister - BBC News
Scottish Secretary Alister Jack tells MPs trans people deserve respect - but Scotland's bill could undermine UK equalities law.
Downing Street insists that using Section 35 of the Scotland Act to veto this Holyrood bill is not a political choice but a legal necessity.

That argument is complicated by the fact that when the mechanism was proposed in 1998, the Conservatives’ Constitutional Affairs Spokesman Michael Ancram was highly critical of it.

The MP for Devizes invoked the notion of colonialism by referring to it as a “governor-general clause” which appeared “to place draconian powers in the hands of the Secretary of State”.

Nicola Sturgeon is now trying to frame the decision to use Section 35 (confusingly known at the time as Clause 33) as an attack on devolution itself.

But her position is complicated by the fact that SNP MPs voted for the Scotland Act after abstaining on Ancram’s amendment

It sought to raise the bar for invoking Section 35 albeit in a way that would probably not have made a difference in this case as it simply required the minister to seek legal advice before making a decision, which the Scottish Secretary Alister Jack appears to have done.

Labour, which designed the devolutionary framework, is in more of a pickle about the gender law itself. UK leader Sir Keir Starmer expressed concerns about it on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg even though Scottish Labour MSPs had voted for it.

So we are now heading for the courts. In the meantime, you might want to ask Ancram for his lottery numbers because, in the House of Commons debate on 12 May 1998, he made this prediction:

“…the purpose of the Opposition throughout the passage of the Bill has been to try to identify the areas in it that could lead to dramatic confrontation between the Parliament and Government in Edinburgh and the Parliament and Government in London.

"I can see within this draconian power—were it used in a way that ran counter to the wishes of the Scottish Parliament—the epitome of such a confrontation.”