Hundreds protest Scotland’s draconian recent hate crime laws

Hundreds of individuals gathered outside the Scottish Parliament on Monday to protest recent hate crime laws that critics have called a danger to free speech and civil liberties. 

The Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act creates a recent criminal offence of “stirring up of hatred” and got here into effect on 1 April. It carries a penalty of as much as seven years in prison, a £10,000 advantageous or each. 

Police Scotland and the Scottish Government define hate crime as “any crime which is perceived by the victim, or every other person, to be motivated (wholly or partly) by malice and ill-will towards a social group”, but police will log ‘hate incidents’ even where no crime has been committed.

Its opponents have said it can be used to silence critics of transgenderism and folks with conservative beliefs on social issues. 

Harry Potter creator JK Rowling – who resides in Scotland – dared the Scottish police to arrest her for calling an inventory of trans women men on X, formerly Twitter. 

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has come out in support of Rowling, saying that “‘people mustn’t be criminalised for stating easy facts on biology”.

Tory peer Zac Goldsmith likened the impact of the Act to living under the Stasi, the key police who terrorised East Germany before the autumn of Communism. Goldsmith said Rowling was “taking risks on behalf of all of Scotland – women particularly”.

“It’s hard to imagine any politician thought it idea to [introduce] these Stasi laws but they’ve they usually may be stopped – if enough people openly challenge them as JK has,” he said on X. 

The Scottish Family Party led a protest outside Holyrood where people held placards saying ‘We hate the hate crime laws’ and ‘The SNP are the hate crime monsters’ – a reference to the SNP’s ‘hate monster’ promoting campaign that ran within the lead-up to 1 April. 

Conservative Anglican blogger Adrian Hilton said the brand new laws were “rolling back centuries of liberal philosophy and Enlightenment progress”. 

Evangelical apologist David Robertson called the brand new laws “crazy” and warned that shifting the definition of a hate crime to the perceptions of the supposed victim “will help modern Scotland change into more of a police state – and fewer tolerant and inclusive”. 

The Free Speech Union said the Act “will probably be a disaster totally free speech within the country, pouring further fuel on the raging fire of cancel culture”. 

The hate crime laws was spearheaded by Humza Yousaf, the First Minister, when he was justice secretary in Nicola Sturgeon’s government.

The Free to Disagree campaign group, whose members include The Christian Institute, said there was considerable “public anxiety” in regards to the impact of the laws on civil liberties and that the brand new approach was “unworkable”. 

Professor Adam Tomkins, the John Millar Chair of Public Law on the University of Glasgow, told the Scottish Herald newspaper that “an incredible deal of police time is now more likely to be wasted having to cope with and dismiss ill-founded complaints made by people who find themselves offended, upset, hurt or distressed by something another person has said”.

“It isn’t against the law to offend someone,” he said.