Scotland’s Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act takes effect on April 1st and extends the offence of “stirring up racial hatred” to the realms of religion, age, disability, sexual orientation and transgender ID.
“Appropriately, it replaces the old Scottish blasphemy law,” Tim Stanley writes for the Telegraph. “Hate crime legislation, like edicts against blasphemy, isn’t only about order and justice but also defining what the community regards as sacred or taboo.” Tim continues:
In past ages it was God vs sacrilege; today it is identity vs prejudice. Lo, the Scottish Government’s own website says that the Act clarifies “the type of behaviour that is not acceptable”, pointing towards “the inclusive and equal society that Scotland aspires to”.
Well, I cannot object to that – if only to avoid arrest. Braver writers, however, have raised a few criticisms.
First, blasphemy laws rarely defend all faith in general, but rather the specific beliefs of the authors – and in that spirit, the Stirring Up Act makes an interesting choice. It proscribes hate on the basis of transgenderism but not on the basis of sex, suggesting that transphobia is a more serious problem than misogyny and potentially creating a loophole by which trans activists can be horrid to feminists but not the other way around. (The SNP promises that all this will be cleared up with a later law on sexism.)
This leads us to the inevitable challenge of vexatious complaints: highly likely when the offences are so poorly defined and the Act covers everything from newspaper columns (oh dear) to tweets (yikes!) to private conversations (I’m going to jail).
Anonymous complaints are welcome; centres have been set up to receive them. The SNP has told Scots not to worry because the fuzz will receive training not to overreact – and if the notion of the police being objective and proportionate makes you howl with laughter, enjoy this expression of free thought while you still can. Police Scotland has already issued an instructive cartoon of a “hate monster” that grows “when yer feeling insecure [or] when ye feel angry”, erupting into prejudice “just ’cause folk look or act different fae you”.
If anything, the patronising language makes one feel more inadequate by evoking a telling off by a primary school teacher, as if 9/11 could have been avoided had Osama been taught the importance of sharing.
But of course, this guff isn’t aimed at Islamists. Just as the liberal/Left state gets to decide what is or isn’t a crime, so coppers turned social workers are let loose to define the criminal type according to their own instincts. Police Scotland’s website says that hate crime is most likely to be committed by “young men aged 18-30”, especially those with feelings of social exclusion “combined with ideas about white-male entitlement”. In plain English, white, working-class boys. Rich, educated, well-travelled people rarely express hate, as we all know. To quote The Simpsons: “No one who speaks German could be an evil man.”
It’s the ultimate indictment of liberal hypocrisy that Scotland’s long march towards a hate-free future begins with a display of racial and class profiling. But that, I suspect, is the point. It’s often said that conservatives are better than the Left at winning power, because their values are more popular. The Left, however, is infinitely better at using power when it gets it, because it rewrites the rules, packs the institutions and sets the country on a course that it is almost impossible to correct – shaming those who object. New Labour did this by creating devolved administrations. Once established, it was hard to question them without sounding anti-democratic. The SNP then transformed devolution into a theatre for independence, doing all the same woke rubbish England does, only quicker and more aggressively – to suggest that Scotland is naturally, historically more tolerant than the bigots down south.
Worth reading in full.
