Mick Hartley

Iain Macwhirter in the Times on Scotland's new Hate Crime Act:

[M]ake no mistake, the Hate Crime Act is a new law. It creates for the first time a standalone crime of “stirring up hatred” against people with the protected characteristics of, among other things “transgender identity”. What constitutes “stirring up” is never made clear. However, we do know that this new offence can be committed in the privacy of your own home since the old “dwelling defence” has been abandoned. Your own son or daughter could, in theory, report you for stirring up transphobic hate at the breakfast table.

We’re assured that, for prosecution to succeed, there must be convincing evidence of “threatening and abusive behaviour”. But these things are already illegal and have been for decades. The stirring-up part is another of those “progressive“ quasi-crimes designed to “send a message” to people to watch what they say or write. Whether or not the sentiment in question is actionable is very much in the eye of the beholder. Uniquely, in our supposedly “blind” justice system, the accuser will decide what is and is not “stirring up hatred”. Police Scotland define a hate crime as “any crime which is perceived by the victim or any other person to be motivated (wholly or partly) by malice or ill will”. You’ve been warned….

Just because an act is badly drafted, insufferably vague and contradictory in law doesn’t make it ineffectual. Indeed, the very vagueness is what makes the Hate Crime Act so insidious.

It is no accident that this law was born at about the same time as the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill and by the same first minister, Nicola Sturgeon. The intention was, at least in part, to give trans people, newly transitioned by self-identification, the same legal protections as people of colour. It has morphed into a legal Frankenstein. This clype’s charter [clype: Scots slang for informer – MH] will cause grief to many innocent people, inhibit free speech, waste police time and occupy the courts with trivial and mendacious offences until it is finally consigned, along with this government’s other daft and illiberal laws, to the legislative rubbish bin.