SNP’s Hate Crime Act is a £1million folly and threat to individual liberty
ThERE were already a fair few grounds on which to consider the sNP’s hate Crime Act a bad idea, but now the reasons number a million. One million pounds is the initial cost of implementing the Act, which passed the scottish parliament in March and became law the following month.
it’s one thing being told to watch what you say but quite another to be billed seven figures for the pleasure.
We know about this outlay thanks to the endeavours of Free to Disagree, the campaign group which led the charge against the Bill when it was before holyrood. Using freedom of information legislation, they were able to establish part of the costs facing Police scotland, the Crown Office and the scottish Courts and Tribunals service, with the figure given as £1,160,600.
if that sounds like a decent chunk of change, it is not even the final bill. The FOi documents also list ‘campaign marketing’ and ‘total costs’ but the associated figures had been redacted in both cases. it’s your money they’re spending but you don’t know how much of it.
Free to Disagree’s Jamie Gillies said: ‘it’s quite something that costs for this new, controversial legislation are already over a million pounds for the justice system. This legislation was always going to be costly. it will see ambiguous new stirring up hatred provisions inserted into scotland’s febrile political climate.
Chilling
‘Of course, the other “costs” we need to consider with this legislation are not monetary. They concern the potential chilling effect on public debate that could come with the new “stirring up” offences. This is the impact we are most concerned about and which we will be monitoring as the new law takes effect.’
While this start-up funding is one of the lamentable consequences of this misguided legislation, Gillies is correct that there are far higher costs of the hate Crime Act.
The new offence of ‘stirring up hatred’ against a litany of protected characteristics has the potential to severely narrow the scope of expressive liberty in scotland. This it would do not only through the terms of the statute but by engendering a culture of fear and uncertainty around what views are permissible and what are verboten.
Yet because the offence is new and drawn in broad brushstrokes it is impossible to know where the line will be. The Catholic Church, for instance, has queried whether the Act would proscribe the Bible, with its verses forcefully condemning homosexuality. The Act’s supporters generally wave away such concerns but they do so precipitously.
Think of the street preachers to be found – at least pre-pandemic – on Buchanan street or Princes street, scripture in one hand, karaoke microphone in the other, urging people to repent or followers of other religions to abandon their false gods and come to Jesus.
Until now, they were mostly ignored, though there were instances of these serfar monisers being arrested by overly eager police officers. The hate Crime Act creates an entirely new offence under which they could be charged. i don’t like what they say and find them a nuisance but do we really want to be a country where Christian evangelists are routinely prosecuted for spreading the Word of God (including those words that are out of step with secular modernity)?
To prevent this happening, the accompanying guidance for police and prosecutors will have to be clear-cut and comprehensive and even then there is no guarantee that injustices won’t be done.
Some progressives wouldn’t be terribly bothered if street preachers got their collars felt, but what about fellow Left-wingers who are as far from bigots as can be but simply take the wrong view in intra-Left disputes?
Feminist group For Women scotland and the respected policy analysts Murray Blackburn Mackenzie warn the Act could be used to silence women’s rights campaigners on the issue of transgender identity. Transgender activists say that transwomen – i.e. biological males who identify as women – are women, no different to biological females, and say the same about transmen, or females who identify as males. They demand transwomen and transmen be treated in all respects the same as natal women and men, and many consider it hateful to do otherwise or to suggest, for example, that transwomen are not women.
Gender-critical feminists see things differently. They consider gender a social construct and many would say it is impossible to be ‘born in the wrong body’ because that supposes there is a right and a wrong way to be a woman or a man. These feminists are especially concerned with women’s sex-based rights and maintaining single-sex exemptions in places like prisons and women’s refuges, while many trans activists consider these exemptions to reinforce discrimination against trans people.
This (angry, bilious) conversation was playing out online, in political parties and on university campuses even as the legislation made its way through holyrood. Merely to state the two competing views on this issue is to capture how technical and recondite the debate is.
Most people find the whole discussion a baffling mish-mash of ‘isms’ and acronyms and keep well away. That’s fine as as it goes but it doesn’t change the fact that the debate exists and that the hate Crime Act will be stress-tested to see whether it can withstand the pressure of enforcing its terms without encroaching on freedom of speech.
This will be especially difficult given how acrimonious political disagreements have become and the willingness of some to involve the police in bitter rows about ideology and policy. We are all but guaranteed a diet of headlines about polite, educated, middle-class women being dragged down the local cop shop and asked to account for something they posted on Twitter.
Bear in mind, too, that this is an Act so invasive to individual liberty, so creepily authoritarian, that it will even apply to words you utter in the privacy of your own home. Ranting preachers might be an irritation on a retail thoroughfare and Twitter a self-righteous noise machine, but we have generally regarded our homes as places where we could say our piece without fear of the boys in blue knocking on the door.
Prejudice may be no less hateful because it is spoken in someone’s front room rather than a street corner, but is it in the public interest to prosecute those who make racist or homophobic comment from their armchair?
Chauvinistic
having an Alf Garnett law seems unnecessary nowadays, when Alf Garnetts are scarcer than they’ve ever been, but even for those who are small-minded or chauvinistic, the well-intended objective of discouraging their views is far outweighed by free speech and privacy considerations. The past is receding and with it the views that belong to it.
Better to let that trend take its course than charge in, slapping handcuffs on wrists and risking a backlash that makes bigots sympathetic figures.
Although some of the more extreme measures were eventually excised from the Bill – such as plans to prosecute plays and even stand-up comedy routines deemed to stir up hatred – it remains a sweeping, dangerously overbroad law.
Of course, MsPs were warned about this by an array of voices, bringing together Left and Right, secular and religious, nationalists and Unionists. They tweaked but did nothing to correct the basic flaw of the Bill: the assumption the state should further extend its power to designate which expressions are permissible and which are not.
in a handy illustration of how politics works, polling conducted during the debate showed 64 per cent of scots were against criminalising offensive speech. When the Bill came before holyrood for
its final reading, 64 per cent of MsPs voted for it.
it is bad enough the taxpayer has to fund this folly to the tune of £1million but they must do so knowing it will do little to encourage a more tolerant society. in all likelihood, and in the hope of every freedom-loving person in the land, this Act will one day be repealed or revised so comprehensively it falls into desuetude. By that time, though, millions more will have been wasted trying to enforce it.