The Daily Telegraph - Features
Scottish hate crime laws aren’t just unworkable, they’re mad
Is beautiful Scotland about to become the most hateful country in the world? We shall know soon enough on All Fools’ Day when Humza Yousaf ’s Hate Crime Act comes into being. This legislation was passed in 2021 when Yousaf was Justice Secretary and it creates a new and somewhat vague offence of “stirring up hatred”.
This is not vague enough, however, for the usual suspects: lawyers who have got high on their own narcissistic supply, have already called for the arrest of JK Rowling. Some trans activists are passing around Police Scotland forms, agitating by saying: “Save this form and get dobbing in Terfs on the 1st of April. You can do it anonymously. I know I will.”
Murdo Fraser (Conservative SMP) is saying he will take legal action against the Police for recording a tweet he sent last year as a “non-crime hate incident”. The incendiary comment? “Choosing to identify as ‘nonbinary’ is as valid as choosing to identify as a cat. I’m not sure governments should be spending time on action plans for either.”
Whatever the intention behind this legislation, it is already looking completely unworkable and, quite honestly, mad. This is because you can be accused of ‘stirring up hatred’ because of race, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity and age but not on the basis of sex. Therefore a man who says he is a woman, has more protection in law than an actual woman
You might think after the collapse of Sturgeon, after misreading the room/country on self-ID, that the government had better things to do. The Scottish public, in poll after poll, list their main concerns as the cost of living crisis, health, education and transport.
There already was legislation, which makes being abusive or threatening to another person criminal. What is all this for apart from the strange march of the SNP into progressive authoritarianism? Now, children can report their parents for hate crime, neighbours can go to a sex store or mushroom farm, not a nasty old police station (I am not making this up) to shop their neighbours. All of social media will now have to be policed – not by the billionaires who make money out of it – but the police.
Some hairy relative of the Honey Monster appeared in a cartoon warning young, working-class men not to give in to the Hate Monster. This managed to be both classist and inane at the same time. The Edinburgh Fringe is bracing itself, not for anything actually funny, but for comics who will either go along with the orthodoxy or those who deliberately won’t. Either is monumentally dull.
Of course, stirring up hatred is a bad thing. It is then usually accompanied by a threat or a move towards violence and this is how hate crime legislation actually works in practice. The speech is usually an aggravating factor, not the only factor. We already have much legislation in place to deal with this. (The Public Order Act 1986, the Communications Act 2003, the Terrorism Act 2006.)
This is why those concerned with free speech are up in arms about this. We don’t have a written constitution, which would limit the powers of institutions on this matter. We have this unspoken understanding. Until we don’t…
Most of us do not think about free speech until ours is threatened. Mine never has been. Public criticism of my controversial view that biology exists is not the same as having one’s speech curtailed, but it does make one alert to that possibility.
We currently live in a culture where the punishment for challenging the ideology is not prison but social censure. Women cannot say what they think at work if they are in the arts, education, the public sector or much of the media. Only recently, I was at an artsy do where one person after another sidled up to say they agreed with me but they just don’t want to say so in public. This means they continue to prop up a load of nonsense, which is construed by paternalistic leaders as somehow popular, when it never is.
If any of this was, in the end, about making the lives of the tiny number of trans people in the UK better I would support it. Instead, it just sharpens the conflict between women’s rights and trans rights by not even acknowledging “sex” at all. If this isn’t “stirring up hatred”, I don’t know what is.
It reminds me of what the brilliant Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie said of an argument with an ex-student: “What matters is not goodness but the appearance of goodness… We are now angels jostling to out-angel one another.” No one expects politicians to be angels, we expect them to produce sensible and workable laws.
One would have to live in an almighty bubble to have produced this McCarthyite lunacy. Still, it only takes one small prick to burst a bubble. I cannot believe one can’t be found in the whole of Scotland.