Mick Hartley

The Telegraph sums it up – Scotland’s Hate Crime Act will make opinions dangerous – and play into the trans lobby’s hands:

Imagine living in a world where sitting in your own living room and saying “men can’t be women” could result in the police logging a “hate incident” against your name.

Imagine, too, that your legally protected right to express such an opinion counted for nothing because all that mattered was whether the person who heard you perceived it to be offensive.

If you live in Scotland, this is the world you will be living in as of Monday. And no, it’s not an April Fool’s prank by the Scottish Government, despite the date when it comes into force.

The Hate and Public Order (Scotland) Act will, according to its critics, be a state-sponsored assault on free speech with sinister parallels to the Stasi in East Germany.

Billed as a necessary legislative update to a hotch-potch of anti-hate laws (it finally abolishes the offence of blasphemy, last prosecuted in 1843) it extends the offence of stirring up hatred to cover not only race and religion but also age, disability, sexual orientation, transgender identity and “variations in sex characteristics”.

Politicians have warned that the new law will be “weaponised” by the radical trans lobby to criminalise anyone who states their belief in the immutability of someone’s birth sex.

Meanwhile, The Telegraph has been told that Police Scotland – which has just announced it will no longer investigate certain low-level crimes – is diverting resources so it can investigate the expected influx of accusatory phone calls it will receive from those offended by other people’s opinions.

The force has promised to investigate every hate crime complaint it receives, and if the complainant (or victim, as they are officially referred to) insists they were upset by something they perceived to be a hate crime, it will be logged as a non-crime hate incident (NCHI) even if there is not a shred of evidence of any crime being committed.

Little wonder that women’s rights campaigners fear that the new law will be used by trans radicals to settle scores and silence anyone who dares to challenge their world view.

If George Orwell was still around, he could perhaps write a book about it and call it Twenty Twenty-Four.

Ooh, clever.

Calum Steele, former general secretary of the Scottish Police Federation, which represents rank and file officers, is among those who fear that the police will be swamped.

He says: “I know from colleagues that they are reallocating resources from elsewhere to be able to deal with the influx of reported hate speech.”

Part of the problem, he says, is that there is nothing to deter malicious complaints made by people wanting to settle scores with each other, because: “It’s difficult to imagine how you could prove someone was wasting police time when the whole thing is based entirely on their perception rather than evidence.”

In other words, it's a charter for vexatious claims – for people with an ideological axe to grind to silence and punish their critics. In that respect it's basically a blasphemy law – as seen for instance in Pakistan, where anyone with a score to settle just accuses their enemy of insulting Islam and it's game over. Nothing to do with crime as we understand it; everything to do with blasphemy against a particular religious/ideological belief. And I think we all know which particular adherents of a religious/ideological belief are going to be making maximum use of this. Gender-critical women, beware.