The Hate Crime Act: 'a spectacular attack on our liberties'
Campaigner Penny Lewis explains why Scotland's new law is an assault both on free speech and on people with 'old-fashioned' values. PLUS: Claire Fox and Ella Whelan on the Hate Crime Act.
On Monday 1 April, the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 came into force. The Scottish Government claims that the aim of the Hate Crime Act is to bring hate laws up to date by expanding them beyond race. Now, it is an offence to communicate or behave in a manner that ‘a reasonable person would consider to be threatening or abusive’ based on the protected characteristics of age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity and intersex, in addition to race.
But in reality, the Hate Crime Act is a badly designed law that will have a chilling effect on free speech. For example, anyone can make a complaint, anonymously, on the basis that they feel particular words constitute ‘stirring up hatred’. It was no surprise to see a flurry of complaints made immediately against author JK Rowling, who has dared the police to arrest her for asserting that men who claim they are women are still men. Perhaps wisely, Police Scotland has already declared that her statements are not being treated as criminal.
A network of ‘third party reporting centres’ has been created, so it isn’t even necessary to go to the police. The ‘dwelling defence’ – that you can’t be prosecuted for things you say or do at home – has been abolished. And as a leading Conservative MSP, Murdo Fraser, discovered last week, even if no crime has been committed, the police can still record any complaint as a ‘non-crime hate incident’, something that could affect a person’s chance of getting a job in the future, particularly in the public sector. No wonder that many people fear they could fall foul of the Act for saying the ‘wrong thing’.
On the day the law came into force, hundreds of protestors gathered at the Scottish Parliament building in Edinburgh to oppose the Act. One of the speakers was academic Penny Lewis, a member of the Scottish Union for Education. The article below is based on her comments at the rally. Plus, listen to Claire Fox and Ella Whelan below.
The Hate Crime Act is a spectacular attack on our liberties. It comes on the back of more than a decade of bad laws from the SNP, including restrictions on parents, on football fans, on freedom of movement and a whole pile of policies designed to make us scared to speak our minds.
This law will have a chilling effect on public political debate, but also everyday discussions at work, after-work drinks, at school, in your local shop, at your fitness class, the pub, and more. Where I work, at universities, the consequences of the Hate Crime Act will be a disaster – they will be the final step in destroying the sense of what a university is for.
I teach at a Scottish university, and I also teach in China. In China, we have cameras in the classroom, and you know that there are certain subjects that you just can’t talk about. Increasingly, I find that we have the same experience in Scottish universities.
In fact, it’s worse, because the Chinese don’t pretend they live in a democracy. They are aware that they live in a police state in which the rule of law doesn’t always operate. In Scotland, it is a huge problem that we don’t recognise our own home-grown dictatorship – our culture of new authoritarianism.
Last week, the principal of my university wrote two messages to all staff and students, welcoming the Hate Crime Act. We were told that the university would not tolerate ‘hate crimes’. But it wasn’t clear what these ‘hate crimes’ were. In fact, we are not supposed to know really what constitutes a hate crime. Its very nature and purpose is that it is flexible and in the eye of the beholder – the offended. It can be used to underline the authority of any of our lacklustre leaders.
I find it scary that a university, the one place where freedom of thought and speech is an essential part of its role, should engage in this kind of scattergun approach to speech and ideas.
The Scottish Government and its policymakers say they are introducing this Act to protect people with certain characteristics. (Sex is not one of the protected characteristics.)
Well, I have campaigned for equal rights for all my adult life, for women and gays, and for immigrants. And I don’t believe that the Scottish Government is doing this for the oppressed. It is using these ‘protected’ groups to undermine aspects of our culture where ordinary people band together with others, people with whom you share something in common - like this rally today.
This Act is not about gay rights or anti-racism. Instead, it seems more targeted at getting people to give up on their commitment to what our leaders regard as old-fashioned ways of understanding the world. For example, at university, scholars over the age of 45 often preface their comments with caveats ‘I’m very old fashioned’ or ‘I’m old school’ – to apologise for their thoughts before they put them out there.
Values such as nation, family, church, reason and rationality are deeply unfashionable. Even sex – biological sex differences, homosexuality, same-sex attraction - are deemed to be too binary and outdated.
Humza Yousaf does not represent an independent Scotland or the passion of Scots to be free of all the rules and bureaucracy that are destroying our cultural life and our economy. He is about as far removed as you can get from ideas like autonomy, independence and self-government.
Even at universities – where our job is to sit, think and speak - we have fallen out of the habit of doing so. Free speech is like a muscle – we may have muscle memory – we may know what to do – but if you don’t get a chance to act out freedom, we forget how it’s done.
These bad laws are founded on the assumption that the role of the law and government is to keep us apart. The assumption is that human beings can’t get along without layers and layers of regulations to control and monitor our words and our actions.
This distrust - let’s call it hatred - of the mass of ordinary people is not inevitable.
I am old enough to remember a time when people didn’t look on everyone outside their family as a stranger, when we had a spontaneous sense of solidarity with people around us, where we assumed that people were innocent until they were judged by their peers and proved to be guilty.
Policy and government have encouraged us to look at each other with suspicion rather than seeing what we have in common. We are being denied the space to understand and appreciate where our opinions are different and how we can get along regardless of our differences.
On the positive side, this bad law has inspired something good: the fact that there so many people here today. I’m feeling something unfamiliar: freedom. The freedom to meet and speak and share ideas. This is democracy in action. We don’t get many opportunities like this. We need to make more.
Penny Lewis is an academic at a Scottish university and a member of the Scottish Union for Education.
Watch and listen
War on words: is Scotland ready for its new hate crime law?
Claire Fox is one of the guests on the Spectator’s flagship podcast, The Edition.
Watch Ella Whelan debating the Hate Crime Act on Times Radio:
'How old do they think their citizens are? It's ridiculous!'
Claire Fox on GB News discussing the Hate Crime Act and the ‘Hate Monster’.
The Evening Edition with Rosie Wright, Times Radio, 2 April 2004
Claire Fox and Michael Binyon discuss the day’s news, including the Hate Crime Act.
The first target of governmental attacks on free speech is never the last.