Roger Gale says home secretary is only really interested in playing to the right wing of the Conservative party

JK Rowling has described the SNP MSP who quit the Scottish government in a row over plans to allow self-identification for transgender people as a “heroine”.

The author, who is known as a vocal critic of the reforms, praised Ash Regan, saying: “This is what a principled politician looks like.”

Her comments on Twitter came after Regan stood down as community safety minister in the Scottish government. She said then that her conscience would not allow her to vote for the gender recognition reform (Scotland) bill, quitting her ministerial post just hours before it faced its first vote at Holyrood.

Rowling, who has previously tweeted a picture of herself wearing a T-shirt calling Scotland’s First Minister a “destroyer of women’s rights” took to social media to praise Ms Regan.

The Harry Potter author wrote: “This is what a principled politician looks like. @AshtenRegan will rightly be seen as a heroine when future generations of Scottish women look back at the profoundly misogynistic legislation currently being pushed through by the Sturgeon government.”

Madeleine Sumption, director of the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, said she imagines policymakers in France and Germany would look at the UK immigration numbers and “wondering what the fuss is about”.

She said the backlog had increased because, as numbers have risen, capacity for decision-making not increased and there are fewer asylum claim decisions being made over the last year or so than before the pandemic.

She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme:

The UK experienced a period for most of the 2010s where there were actually very low numbers of asylum claims by historical standards.