The Scottish National Party’s sinister Hate Crime and Public Disorder (Scotland) Act took effect on 1st April 2024, a date that should go down in infamy.
The Act is an assault on free speech with parallels to the loss of freedom associated with socialistic, totalitarian governments like those in the USSR, National Socialist Germany and Red China. It extends existing hate crime law to cover not only race and religion but also age, disability, sexual orientation and identity and ‘variations’ in sex characteristics.
Guilt is determined by the subjective opinions and feelings of a ‘victim’ involved in a crime defined as an incident involving an act perceived to be motivated, wholly or partly, by hostility or prejudice towards persons with a particular characteristic – a definition so vague that it could, and no doubt will, be used vindictively against anyone the woke don’t like.
This sinister Act effectively undermines the right of free speech and the concept of innocence until proven guilty. Obviously if, before expressing an opinion, you must think whether somebody somewhere might perceive what you say as being hostile to some group or other, you do not have freedom of expression. And you can never prove innocence when the burden of proof is somebody else’s perception. The result, probably intended, is loss of liberty and free speech.
And this loss extends to private conversations in your own home. If, for example, you say that men can’t be women and ‘misgender’ a bloke claiming to be female, and your brainwashed, bolshy teenager objects, you could end up being charged with a hate crime. In the worst case you could end up with a seven year stretch in jail. Let me repeat that – seven years in jail. Not even communist China is as repressive, though there are obvious echoes of the Stalin’s Terror and Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
Nothing about this legislation gives any cause for comfort. Its origin was in the Scottish National Party’s (SNP) 2021 election manifesto, an election they won with an increased majority. The main criticism it faced was from lunatics who wanted it to be even more repressive.
Most Labour members of the Scottish parliament (MSP) voted for the bill. Two voted against, as did two SNP MSPs. Naturally, all LibDem and Green MSPs voted in favour. In all 82 MSPs voted for the Bill and 32 against. A large majority of Scotland’s politicians are, therefore, in favour of muzzling free speech. One slight crumb of comfort, I suppose, is that all Tory MSPs opposed it.
Predictably the Bill has caused chaos. Almost four thousand allegations of hate speech were made in its first two days, one every two seconds. Equally predictably Police Scotland, a force with an appalling record of fighting real crime and who have admitted that they no longer investigate certain crimes, including some cases of theft and criminal damage, vowed to investigate each allegation. Hilariously, there were more complaints against its chief instigator, First Minister Humza Haroon Yousaf, and what many perceived as his racist, anti-white remarks than anything else.
Author JK Rowling reinforced her factually correct opinion that men cannot become women and dared the police to arrest her. They backed down. A further taste of things to come is the sinister, Kafkaesque case involving Tory MSP Murdo Fraser, who said "choosing to identify as 'non-binary' is as valid as choosing to identify as a cat.” Inevitably, a member of the public, reportedly a trans activist, chose to take offence and reported him to the police. In Fraser’s case they concluded that no crime had taken place. But would they have been so tolerant of folk without Rowling’s money or a Tory MPS’s clout? Don’t bet on it. All the signs are that the police intend to implement it in the most authoritarian manner imagineable.
No charges were brought against Fraser, but they added him to their non-crime hate incident (NCHI) database. Yes, you don’t have to commit a crime to be punished for one. When it comes to NCHIs, the punishment is the process. It is no joke ending up on the thought police’s NCHI database. which can be accessed by employers and potential employers, and God knows who else.
The legislation gives police the powers to seize personal property such as computers and mobile phones when a hate crime complaint, is made. They can hold onto them until a decision is made on whether to prosecute which no doubt will take many months.
The implications are obvious and deadly serious: political activists can use police processes to smear law-abiding citizens, adversely affecting their employment prospects for the “crime” of holding opinions with which they disagree. And make no mistake, the intolerant legion of far left organisations like Antifa, BLM, Extinction Rebellion, Hope Not Hate fascists – the modern-day SA of the woke globalist cult - will take advantage of the power these insane laws give them to ruthlessly attack all dissent and opposition to their perverted beliefs.
And the worse than useless politicised police, in whom trust is already at an all-time low, will collaborate with them. They have set up a chain of ‘Hate Crime Third Party Reporting Centres’ where the aggrieved, vexatious, vindictive and fanatical can make anonymous complaints. Such centres, to nobody’s surprise, have been set up on university campuses, but also in a sex shop in Glasgow, a salmon factory in Berwickshire and a mushroom farm in North Berwick. Honestly folk, it’s true, absurd though it all is.
You might ask why on earth Police Scotland are doing all this and involving themselves even if no crime is committed? Obviously, that is the way policing is going in the woke, Globalist New World Order, and they intend to use their powers to the full.
Catching real criminals is seen to be oppressive. They are viewed as victims of society, the patriarchal, racist far right capitalist society of the woke’s fevered imagination. We are being made to fund a uniformed social work department, where the police’s job is to address hurt feelings and reprimand citizens at the behest of keyboard warriors. And, of course, to ruthlessly suppress the ‘far right’ – that basket of deplorables who believe in the family, the nation state, low tax, small government, and free speech and who might not have fallen for the lie that mass immigration and net zero is good for them.
Police Scotland has already indicated who the main target will be. On its website, it informs the public that: “We know young men aged 18-30 are most likely to commit hate crime, particularly those from socially excluded communities who are heavily influenced by their peers. They may have deep-rooted feelings of being socially and economically disadvantaged, combined with ideas about white male entitlement.” If anybody is in any doubt, that means the hated, despised and feared white working class male.
But it’s not only the oiks, playwrights, singers, entertainers, especially comedians, are already looking over their shoulders. Will a comedian at the Edinburgh Fringe be allowed to make fun of Islam or gender ideology? If he does, a complaint is all but inevitable, leaving it to police officers to make ‘subjective decisions’ about what can and cannot be said or mocked. That is a recipe for arbitrary arrest, the hallmark of dictatorships everywhere.
No one asked for this. There is no democratic mandate for it. Parliament has not voted to create NCHIs, and the public has never demanded them. NCHI’s do not stem from any law, but from mere guidance issued by a quango, the College of Policing. But clearly the woke Establishment approves of them and so they persist and spread.
In Fraser’s case the police didn’t even bother to inform him that he had been added to their database. He only found out about it after the same, no doubt Tory hating far left trans activist fanatic that made the original allegation against him, lodged another complaint to the Holyrood standards authorities, citing his inclusion on the database as evidence.
Since the introduction of the Bill, its main instigator Humza has resigned. Many think that this was because of his attack on free speech, but it was nothing of the sort. The real reason was his decision to go it alone and dump the crazy, far left Scottish Greens. The Bill remains in force. A motion to repeal it was defeated. And the man who replaced Humza, John Swinney, architect of the revolting Named Persons Bill aiming to nationalise children, also voted in favour of the Bill. It stretches credulity too far to believe that it will not be used against people expressing opinions that the Establishment does not like.
But it is hard to understand all why the Bill attracted so much adverse media attention. Its provisions are little different to abhorrent legislation already in place in the rest of the UK, Ireland, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, and much of the rest of the EU – all with eerily similar hate crime laws. Poland’s new Globalist government is bringing in legislation almost identical to the Scottish Bill.
And that Bill remains in force, it is now a non-story, ignored and dropped like a stone. Why? Was the media fuss ever about free speech?
Why did the MSM largely fail to point out that we already have similar legislation in the rest of the UK, and why was this not seen as a problem? Slithery Sunak played both ends, doing nothing to actually oppose the Bill and the loss of freedom it entails, but making the odd comment designed to give the impression that he thinks it might not be a good idea.
Hate crime laws in England and Wales are much the same as they are in Scotland, it is ‘who’ the victim is, or ‘what’ the victim appears to be that counts. The UK government defines a hate crime as any offence perceived by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice based on a person's race; religion; sexual orientation; disability and any crime motivated by hostility or prejudice against a person who is transgender.
A hate incident, according to the State, is any incident in which the victim, or anyone else, thinks is based on someone’s prejudice towards them because of their race, religion, sexual orientation, disability or because they are transgender. An incident can be something as trivial as a dirty look. Evidence of ‘hate’ is not a requirement. To report a hate crime or incident it is not necessary to personally perceive the incident to be hate related. It would be enough if another person, a witness or even a police officer might think that it was hate related.
This dire state of affairs has been in place for over a decade, and has been used over and over again to punish and intimidate those whose opinions do not conform to woke globalist orthodoxy, usually dismissed as ‘far right extremists’.
Sunak, in an attempt to convince the gullible that he defends free speech has ‘advised’ English police not to record ‘non-crime hate incidents’ (NCHI) – a term Orwell would be proud of. But of course, this advice is not followed up and has no legal force. Many English forces continue the practice and, indeed, the government continues to post a code of practice for the recording of NCHIs.
Labour says it is not planning on introducing a similar bill to Scotland’s. Note the pusillanimous ‘not planning’. No promise not to, just an assertion that they have no plans – yet. Anyone who trusts the woke globalist cabal of Labour, Tory, Libdem or Green parties with their freedom – or anything else – is naive at best. But of course, there is no need for more legislation. The government already has all the law it needs to prevent debate and curtail free speech and has even outsourced policing to huge corporations like Google and Facebooks.
And be in no doubt, these laws will be used. Their intended purpose is to kill debate on taboo subjects like immigration and Islam. Conceivably, they could be used to stop debate on other subjects, like Net Zero and climate change, that the Globalist Establish do not want discussed.
Most reasonable people agree that it is unacceptable for citizens to be prosecuted as criminals because of their opinions or, innocent of any crime, to have their political views registered by the police and accessed by future potential employers – or indeed anyone else. It is time that we stand up and make it plain that our personal political opinions are none of the police’s damn business.