I hate, you hate, he hates, a fool who doesn’t hate… Just two weeks ago, a new law came into force in Scotland to protect all kinds of minorities (trans, gay, elderly or disabled, black, Asian. ..) of the attacks they are often victims of, and the police have been overwhelmed by a tsunami of accusations.
The intention of the law pushed by nationalist Prime Minister Humza Yousaf, and passed by the Holyrood Parliament, was certainly good, but its sponsors did not expect it to be used for personal and political vendettas, which is what is happening . If someone has a disagreement with another, demand incitement to hatred immediately, and that he defend himself as best he can.
The avalanche of accusations is so impressive – eight thousand in the first week alone – that the police have warned that it does not give the scope, and that at this stage they will only be able to devote themselves to investigating the hatred of some Scots against others, no time for murder, rape, robbery, armed assault and all the other crimes listed in the penal code (Scotland has its own Napoleonic justice system, independent of the English). At the outset, the agents’ holidays have been cancelled.
In 2023, a total of 416,000 crimes were reported in the country. If the current rate of more than 30,000 hate allegations per month continues, prosecutions for this crime will be more than for all others combined (so far the most common was assault, 58,000 per year) , an aberration that the politicians did not foresee when they modified the law.
From April 1 there is a new crime of “threatening, abusive or insulting behavior in order to encourage hatred for reasons of age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity or variations in characteristics sexual”. A Scottish law on gender identity very similar to the Spanish one was overturned a few months ago by the Supreme Court.
The avalanche of accusations of incitement to hatred takes place in a context of cuts in the number of police (the lowest in fifteen years) and the closure of twenty-nine police stations, when the crimes considered have been for years Minor crimes (such as car, flat and shop thefts) are not even investigated. The authorities have warned that at this stage they will not have the resources to fight terrorism and organized crime, and that the mafias will camp in their air.
The opposition feels vindicated because it had warned that the new anti-hate law was too vague in terms of the definition of the crime, without going into details of what constitutes “threatening or abusive behavior”, and giving rise to a very loose interpretation by of citizens who want to tickle neighbors or people with whom they disagree politically (the division between unionists and independenceists has created rifts even within families for a decade). While the SNP considers the law progressive, the Conservatives see it as an authoritarian drift.
The idea was to curb incidents such as street insults to transsexuals, veiled women, men holding hands, people in wheelchairs, Pakistanis and Catholics, or the destruction of rainbow flags in “inclusive” cafes frequented by the LGBTQ community.
For her part, the Scottish writer J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books, is one of the harshest critics of this new law and has challenged the police to arrest her, there are radical elements of the trans community who accuse her on social media of “inciting to hatred” to allege that being a woman is not enough to say it, and to denounce the presence in prisons and women’s locker rooms of men who identify as women. Feminists critical of the new gender identity policies, for whom sex is fundamentally a biological fact, feel “unprotected” by the new law and see their freedom of expression threatened if, to express their opinions, they can be denounced for “inciting hatred”. Intellectuals also see the danger that any joke or joke about transsexuals could be considered a crime. Police have clarified that Rowling’s views do not constitute a crime.
