This Act will pervade through all of Scottish society. Even children are to be targeted. School handbooks now explain that all hate crimes should be reported to the police. Journalist Jim Spence wrote in the Courier that Scotland is about to become a “two-tier society” where “some folk are given protection by the law from some kinds of hate crimes, while others will simply have to suck up abuse.” For example, “while it will be an offence to stir up hate against trans folk”, it “won’t break the law to stir up hate against women”, because astonishingly under this Act sex is not a protected characteristic.

Most people and hopefully all Christians would agree that hate is bad. So, at a superficial level, it would seem that we should all be rejoicing at a Scottish government bill which bans hate. But as is so often the case in the world, things are not quite what they seem 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 become law on April 1st. Sadly it is no joke – other than to make Scotland a laughing stock throughout the world. It is one of 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’ if it is deemed to be motivated by hatred or prejudice. But the controversial part is that it will create a new criminal offence of behaving in an abusive manner ‘designed to stir up hatred’ against groups with certain protected characteristics.

Stirring Up Hatred

The problem with the bill is that it does not clearly define what ‘stirring up hatred’ means. There are already considerable problems in Scotland with this. The main 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 is. An additional problem with the lack of clarity about ‘stirring up’ offences is that Police Scotland define a hate crime as ‘any crime which is understood by the victim or any other person as being motivated, wholly or partly, by malice or ill will towards a social group’.

This means that the subjective feeling of a perceived victim, or of a policeman, could be enough to have you accused of a hate crime – one which carries a sentence of up to seven years. Take for example JK Rowling. If she tweets that a man cannot become a woman, she could be arrested for hate crime. Same for a Christian preacher who says that he does not believe that Muhammad is a prophet or a teacher who says they believe marriage is between a man and a woman.

There’s Been a Misgender!

The police in Scotland have said they will investigate every report of hate crime, despite having recently announced that they would not be investigating every case of ‘low level’ crime, including apparently some cases of theft! If the TV series, Taggart, were being made today, instead of Taggart saying, “There’s been a murder,” he would 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 when they are frustrated and angry and take it out on others, because they feel like they need to show they are better than them. In other words, they commit a hate crime.”

White Working Class Men Are Hateful

In an astonishing statement they give an example of the kind of people 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 likely to commit hate crime, Police Scotland are breaking their own law. At least they would be if they were to be consistent. But therein lies the danger of this law. It has nothing to do with consistency or justice.

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