Dark day for Scotland as hate crime law is passed

JUST when you think things cannot get much worse in Scotland, they do. With the backing of their perpetual supplicants, the ‘Greens’, the SNP government pushed their Hate Crime Bill through the Scottish parliament last night.

This is a dark event for the country of the Enlightenment among whose thinkers we count Adam Smith, David Hume, and Thomas Reid, founder of the Scottish School of Common Sense (!) All of them, to use the vernacular, will be birling in their graves.

Scotland, of course, is also the place where George Orwell chose to complete his masterpiece 1984, in which he foresaw the tyranny of the ‘Thought Police’, dark forces who monitor every citizen for wrong thought, speech, or action.

Arguably, even Orwell might be shocked to see just how far along the road to oppression we have been led. Scotland will, because of this legislation, become a country where the government is the sole arbiter of the acceptable viewpoint at any given time. We will live under some of the most draconian laws in the world, where almost anything a person says or does could be judged a ‘hate crime’.

The Scots as a nation have previously demonstrated a strong tradition of valuing independent thought, discovery, experimentation, sound discourse. They have questioned everything from the world they lived in to the ideas that shaped their lives. Above all, they have valued the freedom to think and to speak.

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