Most people and hopefully all Christians would agree that hate is bad. So, at a superficial level, it might seem that we must always all be rejoicing at a Scottish government bill which bans hate. But as is so often the case on the earth, things usually are not quite what they appear and words have different meanings.
None more so than in The Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act, passed three years ago. It was the brainchild of the then justice secretary for the Scottish government, Humza Yousaf. Yousaf is now the Scottish First Minister and his bill is about to develop into law on April 1st. Sadly it isn’t any joke – aside from to make Scotland a laughing stock throughout the world. It is probably the most draconian, authoritarian measures passed by a democratic government in recent times – and it has profound implications for the Church.
The bill will firstly turn any crime into an ‘aggravated offence’ whether it is deemed to be motivated by hatred or prejudice. But the controversial part is that it should create a latest criminal offence of behaving in an abusive manner ‘designed to fire up hatred’ against groups with certain protected characteristics.
The problem with the bill is that it doesn’t clearly define what ‘stirring up hatred’ means. There are already considerable problems in Scotland with this. The fundamental one is with the definition of hate crimes. Police Scotland have a working definition that if the ‘victim’ perceives it to be a hate crime, then it’s. An additional problem with the shortage of clarity about ‘stirring up’ offences is that Police Scotland define a hate crime as ‘any crime which is known by the victim or every other person as being motivated, wholly or partly, by malice or unwell will towards a social group’.
This signifies that the subjective feeling of a perceived victim, or of a policeman, may very well be enough to have you ever accused of a hate crime – one which carries a sentence of as much as seven years. Take for instance JK Rowling. If she tweets that a person cannot develop into a lady, she may very well be arrested for hate crime. Same for a Christian preacher who says that he doesn’t imagine that Muhammad is a prophet or a teacher who says they imagine marriage is between a person and a lady.
The police in Scotland have said they may investigate every report of hate crime, despite having recently announced that they’d not be investigating every case of ‘low level’ crime, including apparently some cases of theft! If the TV series, Taggart, were being made today, as an alternative of Taggart saying, “There’s been a murder,” he can be crying out, “There’s been a misgender.”
Police Scotland have also gone into full swing with their anti-hate propaganda, putting out a cartoon of the ‘hate monster’ and explaining that, “The Hate Monster represents that feeling some people get once they are frustrated and offended and take it out on others, because they feel like they need to point out they’re higher than them. In other words, they commit a hate crime.”
In an astonishing statement they offer an example of the sort of individuals who commit hate crimes as those with “deep-rooted feelings of being socially and economically disadvantaged, combined with ideas about white-male entitlement”.
By targeting white working-class men as being more prone to commit hate crime, Police Scotland are breaking their very own law. At least they’d be in the event that they were to be consistent. But therein lies the danger of this law. It has nothing to do with consistency or justice. As for ‘equality before the law’, that is just so old-fashioned! Now we now have the State making a two-tier justice system where some groups are afforded ‘protected’ status and others are attacked.
We have been heading this manner for a while. Back in 2018, I reported the police to themselves for hate crime over their ill-judged “Dear Bigots” post campaign. They replied that since the Scottish government campaign was not motivated by hate towards any particular group, they’d not be taking any motion – thus putting themselves within the position of breaking their very own rule that the perception of the victim is what counts, and setting the Scottish government and its now political police wing above the law. Expect rather more of the identical after April 1st.
This Act will pervade through all of Scottish society. Even children are to be targeted. School handbooks now explain that each one hate crimes must be reported to the police. Journalist Jim Spence wrote within the Courier that Scotland is about to develop into a “two-tier society” where “some folk are given protection by the law from some sorts of hate crimes, while others will simply need to suck up abuse.” For example, “while it should be an offence to fire up hate against trans folk”, it “won’t break the law to fire up hate against women”, because astonishingly under this Act sex is just not a protected characteristic.
Stuart Waiton, senior lecturer in criminology on the University of Abertay, Dundee, warns, “There is now a serious danger that lecturers will likely be reported to the police for simply expressing ideas that some students don’t agree with or like. We could even find students like Lisa Keogh, who was taken to a disciplinary for arguing that ladies haven’t got penises, ending up with a police record, as every criticism is recorded by the police. This is prone to create a chilling atmosphere in universities.”
Sadly it won’t just be in the schools. The police are to establish Third Party Reporting Centres throughout Scotland where you possibly can go and ‘clipe’ (a Scots word for snitch or tell-tale) on anyone. These reporting centres include a sex shop in Glasgow, a mushroom farm in North Berwick, and a demolished office block in West Dunbartonshire!
And then there are comedians and actors. The Herald reported on police training which encouraged officers to go after anyone who produces material deemed ‘threatening and abusive’. You may very well be prosecuted for a negative portrayal of a trans person in a play, for instance.
But the thought police usually are not finished there. The hate crime law states that “giving, sending, showing, or playing the fabric to a different person” will make you liable to prosecution. If you repeat a joke on the web which someone within the ‘protected’ characteristic finds offensive, you can be guilty of a hate crime.
And as if that weren’t extreme enough, you can be reported for expressing ‘hate’ in your individual home. As Jim Spence identified, “It’s a recipe for disaster cooked up by a liberal political class which thinks you could expunge human emotions, sentiments, and behavior, from real life.”
The delusions of grandeur from the Scottish government don’t just extend to considering that by decree they will eradicate hatred of their ‘Scottish values’ paradise. No, they wish to cope with the entire world. The law holds that anything that might be read in Scotland is to be regarded as published in Scotland. So, I may very well be sued in Australia for writing something in Australia, if someone went to a sex shop in Glasgow to anonymously report me for a hate crime.
The opposition to this is robust, bringing together unlikely allies including The Christian Institute, the National Secular Society, the Peter Tatchell Foundation and the Adam Smith Institute, amongst others. Scottish Catholic bishops have also expressed concern, however the Church of Scotland has been strangely silent. And sadly, some well-know Christian MSPs have gone together with the party whip and voted for this ill-considered, authoritarian policy. It’s an awesome example of turkeys voting for Christmas.
I asked Humza Yousaf, the architect of this latest Scottish blasphemy law, the next query – an issue which he has refused to reply. The last person to be prosecuted (180 years ago) under the old blasphemy law was an Edinburgh bookseller, Thomas Paterson, who advertised amongst other things “that the Bible and other obscene works not sold at this shop”.
Under the brand new law would an Edinburgh bookseller be free to advertise something like “the Quran and other obscene works not sold at this shop”? I feel Paterson was mistaken then and a bookseller can be mistaken and unwise to do this today, but when Mr Yousaf’s law signifies that such a bookseller can be prosecuted then we now have ended up in a far worse situation now than we now have been for the past 180 years because we now have a blasphemy law which will likely be enforced. And the blasphemy is just not against God, but against the Holy State and whatever it decides is ‘hateful’ (i.e. against their values).
Scotland, a rustic once described as ‘the land of the people of The Book’, is becoming an awesome example of what happens when a rustic turns from its Christian roots and reverts to a sort of pre-Christian ‘progressive’ paganism. It becomes an authoritarian, confused and unjust basket case (with apologies to all baskets – who I hope is not going to report me!). May the Lord have mercy and switch us again!
David Robertson is the minister of Scots Kirk Presbyterian Church in Newcastle, New South Wales. He blogs at The Wee Flea.
