Two weeks in and Scotland’s already riven by mutiny and chaos over the most absurd law since Henry VIII’s beard tax
THERE was no shortage of people wanting to join this party. In fact, just nine minutes after going online last month, all the tickets had gone for a night of rich comedy at one of Edinburgh’s most fashionable nightclubs.
The audience would be a very mixed bag, as it turned out. According to one organiser, they spanned ‘radical separatist lesbians, libertarian males, geeky unwashed students and middle-aged Daily Mail readers’. They all had one thing in common, though. They all wanted to have a good laugh at one of the most absurd laws since Henry VIII’s beard tax.
And there is certainly plenty to laugh (or cry) about with regard to Scotland’s new Hate Crime and Public Order Act.
Indeed, over the last few days, it has united judges, police officers and pretty much the entire Scottish public in their mockery of a chaotic exercise in virtuesignalling by the country’s ruling Scottish Nationalist/Green alliance.
This is a law that makes it a ‘hate’ crime to abuse a man in a dress but not a woman wearing the very same dress. For, while it offers specific protections for those who are transgender, non-binary or simply cross-dressing, it does not offer similar protections for women.
There are other ‘protected characteristics’ on grounds of race, age, sexual orientation and even nationality (it could now be a ‘hate’ crime to say something nasty about the English). Furthermore, you can commit a ‘hate’ crime in the privacy of your own home. An expensive multi-media campaign now urges anyone to report all transgressions.
But this confusion and broad definition of hate is what has stalled Ireland’s proposed hate speech Bill in the Seanad since last June.
At the time, Minister for Justice Helen McEntee said that defining ‘hate’ or ‘hatred’ too narrowly could lead to loopholes and ways of evading prosecution.
However, this has been seen as leaving a supposed crime open to interpretation and has led to growing number of TDs calling for it to be rewritten or ditched altogether, as many are doing in Scotland.
THE new Scottish law has meant that even if you are a dinner party guest offended by a remark, or a child objecting to a fruity comment from a grandparent, just pick up the phone, folks.
This law allows anyone to report anyone else – anonymously – whether the ‘hate’ has been directed at themselves or not.
What’s more, Police Scotland have vowed to follow up every allegation. It has not helped that this comes just weeks after they said that they will no longer bother to investigate other ‘minor’ crimes, such as thefts from sheds or vandalism.
In other words, if someone nicks your mower or scratches your car, the cops may not be interested. However, crack an off-colour joke about the perpetrators and you could be in the dock. The penalty? Up to seven years in prison.
Humour is no laughing matter of course. With five days to go before last week’s Comedy Unleashed gala poking fun at the new law on its opening day, the event was suddenly homeless.
Fearful of the possible backlash – whether from trans activists or the political elite is unclear – management of the Coco Boho bar (who have been contacted for comment) felt obliged to pull the plug.
With time running out, the organisers were left scrabbling around for a suitable venue, at which point one of the more vilified subsets of Scottish national life came to the rescue – football fans.
So the ticket-holders were redirected across town to quaff pints at the Hibernian FC Supporters Club bar.
And a great night was had by all, judging by the applause and laughter on the newly released YouTube footage of the evening, with plenty of risqué jokes about pretty much everything – from the transgender lobby, lesbians, Judaism and Islam to pensioners, penises and politicians (not just the usual ‘Tory scum’ stuff but some bracing mockery of the SNP’s once-untouchable Nicola Sturgeon).
‘We’ve been inundated with emails from people saying “thank you”,’ says Andrew Shaw, co-founder of Comedy Unleashed.
EVEN so, the very fact that this event had to be organised like some underground dissident rally or a Prohibition-era Speakeasy says it all.
‘It’s just another example of the chilling effect of this Bill,’ says Marion Calder, one of the founders of For Women Scotland, the group behind the comedy evening. They are not a slick professional activist organisation blessed with government grants, like the lobby groups who have been pushing the new Hate Bill through parliament. They were founded six years ago by three mothers deeply concerned about the way males could reclassify themselves as female, with inevitable consequences for everything from women-only spaces to sport, prisons, even census data.
‘The politicians were talking about people being able to self-identify and the people were saying, “What the hell do you mean by self-identification”, and that’s how we started,’ says Marion, a divorcee with a grown-up son who works in healthcare.
In no time, the group found themselves bearing the full brunt of hostility towards anyone impertinent enough to question the ‘No Debate’ orthodoxy on trans rights.
‘People would follow us out of meetings, swear at us in the street, that sort of thing,’ says Marion.
Co-founder Susan Smith, a mother of three with a career in finance, tells me how trans activists would report them to the police for non-specific crimes whenever they set up a street stall. ‘The police would turn up and were very nice about it and would ask to see our literature and then go away – but it was ridiculous,’ says Susan.
That was before the new law on ‘hate’ crime came in on April 1. The group have not attempted a street stall since. ‘Our real fear is not criminalisation, because we don’t think a court would really find us guilty of “hate”,’ says Marion.
‘The problem is the impact of an investigation if the police start taking away phones and computers.
‘Then you have the complaint hanging over you all that time and it starts to eat away at your life. It’s that chilling effect again.’
I have heard ‘chilling effect’ a great deal this week, and with good reason. For there is real fury here in Scotland.
The Conservative MSP Murdo Fraser is already waging war on Police Scotland for launching an investigation into a tweet in which he said that an attempt to identify as non-binary (neither man nor woman) was as valid as ‘choosing to identify as a cat’.
That, too, occurred before the introduction of the new law. Police Scotland recorded this as a ‘non-crime hate incident’, looked into it and took no further action.
What has appalled Mr Fraser is that he did not even know about the investigation until it was drawn to his attention by an independent ombudsman. Nor is it clear if his name was expunged from all police records.
FOR now, there is the possibility that you can be associated with a ‘hate’ crime without even knowing it, while those details could show up on a subsequent police search by future employers or government agencies.
‘This is going to have a very long tail. There will be thousands of complaints,’ says Calum Steele, former general secretary of the Scottish Police Federation. ‘People merely have to “perceive” a hate crime and it must be investigated.’
What irks him is the lack of leadership and clarity from the top.
All over Edinburgh, I see billboards saying ‘Hate Hurts’ and urging me to complain. Yet following an utterly predictable tsunami of complaints – 8,000 in the first week alone – Scotland’s First Minister, Humza Yousaf, has turned round and told people not to worry. He says the law
‘doesn’t deal with people just being offended or upset’. Except all the advertising says it does.
What’s more, the official police and government line is that everything is fine when it clearly is not.
‘The messaging has been horrendous,’ says the chairman of the Scottish Police Federation, David Threadgold. ‘The ordinary officers are being told that this law has no impact on policing, which is entirely misleading.’
Across Scotland, there has been widespread contempt for Police Scotland’s risible online campaign featuring a furry ball of cartoon anger called ‘The Hate Monster’.
Reminiscent of the cartoons used to promote condoms in the early days of Aids, this creature is clearly male, working class and thick. It growls a warning that the hate monster in all of us can get ‘bigger and bigger ’till he’s weighing ye doon. Then, before ye know it, ye’ve committed a crime’.
‘It is utterly cringe-worthy and has clearly been devised by a bunch of people in violent agreement with each other, an inevitable result of groupthink,’ says Calum Steele.
‘The fact that not a single solitary senior police officer saw that and didn’t put a stop to it asks a very serious question.’
The Conservative shadow justice spokesman, Russell Findlay, points out that the Scottish Tories were the only party to oppose the new law. He also says that it has served to underline the inadequacies of Police Scotland, a Scottish National Party creation forged from the merging of all the old regional forces.
‘It is riven with chaos and the chief constable has been invisible during this latest crisis,’ he says.
For years, no government-funded body would dare to speak out against the mighty SNP when Nicola Sturgeon ruled the place.
Now, public sector workers and bodies are starting to break ranks.
Coppers openly attack their leadership while senior officers, fearful of upsetting their political masters, dodge the cameras and issue statements saying all is well – even if no one is going to investigate your burgled shed.
This week, David Hope, formerly Scotland’s senior judge, called it ‘unworkable’ and an example of ‘gesture politics’.
‘I’ve not seen anything like this before, and it’s no wonder the police are being deluged in trying to carry it out,’ he told the Times.
I go for a wander in the Scottish Parliament. In the public entrance lobby, there is a photo of the late Queen Elizabeth but none of King Charles. But there is a hologram of a veteran LGBT campaigner.
The gift shop sells suffragette magnets and badges but this was the same parliament that ejected a woman from a 2022 committee meeting for wearing a scarf in suffragette colours (while staff were still permitted to wear the trans and Pride movements’ colours).
The presiding officer later apologised but it leaves groups like For Women Scotland in no doubt which way the establishment leans – and it is not, they insist, in favour of biological women.
They point to the hefty grants given to pro-trans groups, whereas their own activities have to rely on donations.
They remain deeply grateful to the author JK Rowling who has funded much of their campaigning. The Harry Potter creator has been a formidable ally for those who believe that a man cannot become a woman just because he says so. No sooner had the new Act come into force than the writer posted a series of social media messages describing various well-known transgender women as men and challenging the authorities to arrest her.
Scotland’s first minister was then forced to confirm she would not be arrested. The co-leader of the Scottish Greens, Patrick Harvie, accused Rowling and others of ‘performative nonsense’ and ‘deliberate misinformation’ which threatens to have ‘real world consequences’ for protected minorities. No one seems to know the real legal position.
OUT on the streets, ordinary Scots are baffled and cross. I head for the Coco Boho, the place that cancelled the comedy booking. It sits beneath the smart and elaborately decorated Tigerlily Hotel, a boutique joint draped in pink flowers. It is next door to a shop selling Fair Trade Palestinian goods. I sense this is a pretty broad-minded part of town. On the street outside, however, I do not find a single supporter of the new law or its ethos.
‘It’s horrible how they can think of criminalising people in their own home,’ says Douglas, a retired oil industry executive. ‘It shows how little faith the SNP have in people. And look at all the other crimes that are going up in the meantime.’ His wife, Linda, a former primary school teacher, says simply: ‘This isn’t the Scotland we used to know.’
Douglas goes further: ‘It’s a banana republic without the bananas and you can quote me on that – though I might be breaking this new law.’
They head off with one parting shot. ‘Thank god for JK Rowling,’ says Douglas.