IT DOESN’T take Malcolm Tucker levels of spin doctor sophistication to work out that April Fools Day might not be the date to bring in a controversial new law.

Equally, the famed fictional communications director might have ensured that the minister concerned could describe the new statute accurately when in a TV or radio studio, rather than getting it wrong, repeatedly, for three days.

This is Scotland though, where our legislators prefer drama to detail and, when it comes to the laws they make, care more about the pose than the product.

On April Fools Day morn, the Hate Crime and Public Disorder (Scotland) Act came into effect. Siobhan Brown MSP, Scottish government Minister for Victims and Community Safety, was asked whether “misgendering” would now be a crime. The minister couldn’t clarify, saying it would be a matter for Police Scotland.

Something spectacularly tested a few hours later by JK Rowling on X. Declaring transwomen to be men she added: “Scottish lawmakers seem to have placed higher value on the feelings of men performing their idea of femaleness, however misogynistically or opportunistically, than on the rights and freedoms of actual women and girls.”

She then challenged the police to arrest her. Thousands of complaints were received but it was a challenge the police failed to rise to.

Not only is no action to be taken against Rowling under the new law, but Police Scotland seems also to have abandoned their existing policy of recording “non-hate-crime incidents.”

As the furore developed the hapless Brown was called upon to explain what was and wasn’t covered by the new Act. She decried “misinformation” as being a real problem.

Which wasn’t lacking in irony, as in a string of interviews, over a number of days, she herself got what the law says seriously wrong. According to the minister, the threshold for criminal speech is communications that are “threatening and abusive, with the intent to stir up hatred towards an individual” when the Act says speech that’s threatening or abusive, a much lower threshold, and the “stirring up hatred” references in the law are towards groups, not individuals.

Bear in mind this Act was passed three years ago. The Scottish government has had all that time to ensure it was understood by police and the public — yet even their own ministers don’t understand it. That lack of clear messaging speaks volumes about the lack of clarity in the legislation.

All of this has been higher profile than most Scots law. It isn’t unusual: it’s merely the latest example of a failure to pass a workable law in what increasingly looks like institutional incompetence.

There has been legislation that is so incompetent it has to be repealed, as in the case of the Offensive Behaviour at Football Act, or struck down by the Supreme Court for human rights breaches, as with the so-called Named Persons Act, or passed but just quietly put on a shelf because it is an embarrassment, like the Railway Policing Act 2018 (having failed to break up Britain, the SNP wanted to break up British Transport Police).

Bills are poorly drafted — then committees fail to properly scrutinise them. The resulting legislation then takes years to put into anything like a workable state.

Also coming into effect last week was the so-called Safe Staffing Act. This gives new rights to NHS staff to raise issues about short or inadequate staffing. This was passed four years ago (and most NHS staff are still unaware of it).

While much of the fault for these failings can be laid at the feet of the SNP and more recently the Greens, there is a good deal of cross-party blame here. Many of the measures above had cross-party support. Legislation for both government and opposition is more about garnering headlines than the hard graft of coming up with something that works.

A strategy for remedying this overarching ineptitude is beyond the scope of this article, not least because these are problems with deep roots and tackling them will be complex, and not confined to Holyrood.

Local government needs to regain status and authority as a democratic counterweight to Holyrood. There is also a crying need to remedy the current echo chamber-generating situation where “civic Scotland” and “grant-funded Scotland” are the same thing.

Then we might have properly thought through legislation that is robust enough to survive the Harry Potter author casting a “challengus” spell.