How Scotland became an Orwellian nightmare

Despite being so stretched that they are already refusing to investigate crimes including thefts not captured by CCTV, Police Scotland has also been running a campaign urging the public to use the new law, with the now infamous cartoon “hate monster” that “makes you want to vent your anger just ’cause folk look or act different from you…then before you know it, you’ve committed a hate crime”.

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.”

Steele is also concerned that treating law-abiding people as suspects will damage the contract between the public and the police known as policing by consent.

One of those who expects to be in the firing line on Monday is Lucy Hunter Blackburn, a gender-critical writer and one third of Murray Blackburn Mackenzie, a firm of policy analysts based in Edinburgh.

“This is about the use of state powers and the road to hell being paved with good intentions,” she says. “I am a middle-class, lefty liberal and I am 99 per cent sure I’m going to get reported to the police when Monday comes.

“I don’t think we are going to see prisons stuffed with [gender-critical] women but I think it will be used to bully people. People are already looking over their shoulders so you can see the chilling effect this is having on free speech.”

The Scottish Government insists that free speech is protected under the new law, and under separate freedom of expression laws; whether or not that is true might ultimately have to be decided by the courts.

The doubters cite the fact that the new Act expressly permits people to voice “antipathy, dislike, ridicule or insult” when it comes to religion (something religious groups were keen to include, in order to allow robust debate of faith matters) but there is no such carve-out for any of the other protected characteristics covered by the law.

Legal scholars have argued that the absence of this caveat for transgender identity, among other characteristics, could reasonably be interpreted to mean that it is not permissible to express antipathy, dislike, ridicule or insult for the other categories. Does this mean that expressing “dislike” for someone’s age or transgender identity could be a crime?

Dr Foran says part of the problem is that the new law is vague.

He says: “Ordinarily you might assume that ridiculing someone would not cross the threshold [of criminality] but because it specifically says you can ridicule religion it suggests you can’t ridicule other things, and that raises questions for freedom of expression.

“It also creates new criminal offences around stirring up hatred, which was originally confined to race but which is now extended to trans identity among other things.

“But it doesn’t introduce an equivalent crime of stirring up hatred on the basis of someone’s philosophical belief, such as gender critical beliefs. So encouraging people to punch trans people is covered by the law but encouraging someone to punch Terfs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) isn’t.” Susan Smith argues that this creates a “hierarchy” of rights, in which the law places the rights of transgender people above the rights of gender critical women.

The Winston Smith of this modern-day Orwellian saga is the author JK Rowling, who has incensed the radical trans lobby by repeatedly insisting men cannot be women.

Former prosecutor Rajan Barot has advised her to delete her posts on Twitter which, he says, “most likely contravene the new law”, to which Rowling has defiantly replied: “If you genuinely imagine I’d delete posts calling a man a man, so as not to be prosecuted under this ludicrous law, stand by for the mother of all April Fools’ jokes.”