Joanna Cherry’s Fringe show warning highlights the sorry state of public debate in our country- Susan Dalgety

Except this show promises to be one of the most explosive of the Fringe if the email I have just received is anything to go by.

The gig in question stars Joanna Cherry, the SNP MP for Edinburgh South West. I know Joanna slightly. I don’t agree with her main political stance – that Scotland should leave the UK – but in every other area she is my kind of politician.

Left of centre. Feisty. Hard-working. A feminist. And she can be very funny.

Yet if I was to take the warning from the Stand Comedy Club where she is appearing this week at face value, I would think she was one of the most dangerous people in the county.

The email spells out very strict guidelines for the audience. We are to follow all instructions from the security personnel on duty.

All bags larger than a small handbag are to be checked in. Small bags will be searched and people may be asked to empty their pockets.

Metal detectors will be in operation, the email warns. Then it gets serious. Any person carrying weapons, glue, paint, chemicals, loud hailers and or banners will be refused entry.

Really? Who would take a weapon or chemicals or even a loud hailer to watch a female politician talk about her life and her job? Extreme trans activists, that’s who

People, mostly under 35, who believe that human beings can change their sex at will and that women like Joanna Cherry, who does not, are the she-devil.

Joanna is deemed so dangerous by trans activists and their allies that the Stand cancelled her show a few months ago, only to reinstate it after a huge outcry by the sensible majority.

In its defence the Stand is only taking sensible precautions. In recent years whenever women like Joanna gather to discuss their sex-based rights or to protest against plans for gender reform, they are invariably met by screaming trans activists.

I have attended events where women have been spat at, told we’re bigots and filthy witches, that we smell, that we’re too old and should crawl off and die.

Women have been physically assaulted. In 2019, leading feminist journalist Julie Bindel was attacked after an event at Edinburgh University.

The screening of a film, Adult Human Female, has been cancelled twice by the same university, after trans activists stopped women from seeing it using physical intimidation.

And only last week women’s rights campaigner Julie Marshall was left badly bruised and with a black eye after an attack at a women’s rally in an Aberdeen park.

All in the name of gender reform which, by the way, is fully supported by the First Minister and other leading politicians.

I am looking forward to Joanna Cherry’s show, and catching up with friends I haven’t seen for a while. We may even enjoy a glass of wine after the show.

But what does it say about the state of public debate in our country that the Fringe had to send the audience a warning email about security?