MSP ‘FRUSTRATED’ BY HATE CRIME BILL ROW

A FORMER Ayrshire MSP has said SNP ministers were “caught by surprise” when a row broke out over Scotland’s new law on hate crime.

Jeane Freeman, who represented Carrick, Cumnock and Doon Valley until she retired in 2021, said the legislation, brought in last week, should have included misogyny

Speaking on The Sunday Show on BBC Scotland, she revealed her reaction to the new law was one of “frustration at the level of misinformation”.

The former health secretary said: “My impression is that the furore and genuine concerns over the last week has caught the Scottish government by surprise.”

She said she understood why some women’s groups agreed misogyny should not be included following a 2022 report by a review group chaired by Baroness Helena Kennedy KC.

But she added: “My own view is that was a loophole that you left in the legislation, left wide open to be exploited.

“So I have two sets of conflicting frustration. One about how this has been handled, prepared for and presented, and the other being how it has been mishandled and misinformed in a lot of the presentation and comment.”

The current Ayr MSP, Siobhian Brown, revealed last week that a ‘fake complaint’ under the new legislation had been made in her name.

Last week, First Minister Humza Yousaf said the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 protected the “most vulnerable and marginalised” while safeguarding freedom of expression and speech.

The act creates a new crime of “stirring up hatred” relating to age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity or being intersex.

The maximum penalty is a prison sentence of seven years.

A person commits an offence if they communicate material, or behave in a manner, “that a reasonable person would consider to be threatening or abusive,” with the intention of stirring up hatred based on the protected characteristics.

Police Scotland received thousands of complaints after its launch last week, many of them branded “vexatious” by the Scottish Government.

In a visit to Ayrshire on Saturday, Mr Yousaf said critics of the new legislation should “stop peddling misinformation” around the new law.

He said: “What we’ve got is a piece of legislation that, in the actual Act itself, explicitly in black and white, protects freedom of expression, freedom of speech.

“At the same time, it makes sure that it protects people from hatred being stirred up against them, and that is really important when we have far too many incidents of hatred that can be because of their age, disability, sexuality or religion.”