Scotland: No Country for Young Men
By Roger Watson, European Conservative.
Scotland recently took a giant step towards becoming one of the most restrictive countries in Europe. The adjective ‘Orwellian’ trips too easily off of the lips these days, but with severe and significant restrictions to free speech being introduced in the contents of the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021, which came into force on 1 April 2024, it is hard to imagine a more apt description.
According to the Scottish government’s own website, the Act “creates new stirring up of hatred offences for protected characteristics including age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, and transgender identity.” At face value, this seems reasonable. It is not nice to express hateful feelings towards people on the basis of their characteristics, immutable or adopted, and it cannot be pleasant to be at the receiving end of hateful abuse. But to elevate verbal abuse and hurt feelings to the status of a crime is to pave the way towards a police state or, as is the case of Scotland, to take another step towards a police state. Scotland already has a unitary police force, Police Scotland, formed in 2013.
The formation of Police Scotland abolished the regional police authorities in Scotland and put policing across the whole country under the control of the Scottish Police Authority, a body of the government. Police Scotland has enthusiastically taken to its role in policing hate crime. They have developed a training package which contains the apparently contradictory statement that the package includes “examples of a range of scenarios where offences might take place, but this does not mean officers have been told to target these situations or locations.” If so, then why include those “situations or locations”?
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