The lesson of Scotland’s new hate crime law, unleashed on a baffled nation on April Fool’s Day, is that free speech needs perpetual vigilance. When your back’s turned, the nutters — step forward First Minister Humza Yousaf — will introduce restrictions on what ordinary people say and think which could put them in jail.
Far more worryingly, it means you think twice before saying anything that might get you into trouble, not with the thought police, but the actual police. And that’s not just in public but in your own home — because you can be done for views said in private.
Good luck to the poor sap who tries to take on one of the richest women in Britain as a test case, given what her legal team will look like.
Specifically, the offence of “stirring up racial hatred” will be extended to disability, religion, sexual orientation, age, transgender identity and “variations in sex characteristics”. And the offence, as with other hate crime law, is entirely subjective. If your feelings are hurt by someone’s talk, that’s good enough.
JK Rowling was always going to be in the activists’ sights. She has forthright views on how trans issues impinge on the rights of women. Earlier Rajan Barot, a former fraud prosecutor for the CPS, warned that her old tweets “most likely contravene the new law” and advised her to “start deleting”. She 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 Fool’s jokes.”
And so it turned out. She wrote on X that some trans activists were men and Barot called on the police and the Procurator Fiscal to sort her out. She responded: “Totally agree. I have been DELIBERATELY DEFIANT…#ArrestMe”. Good for her. And good luck to the poor sap who tries to take on one of the richest women in Britain as a test case, given what her legal team will look like.
But it should not be down to Rowling to take on the state to protect free speech. This law should have been seen off by proper liberals, but it was passed not just by ScotsNats (whose sane members must be wishing they had elected Kate Forbes as leader), but by the Greens, Lib Dems and Labour. Which makes you wonder, where was Sir Keir Starmer, former director of public prosecutions, when this dangerous law was being debated? Has he no pull with Scottish Labour? Did he not notice?
The implications of what happens in Scotland for what happens here are huge. Has Sir Keir taken a stand against this attack on free speech? If not, why not?
