The SNP’s war on free speech
by Andrew Tettenborn, spiked:
The Scottish government’s new hate-crime laws will have devastating consequences for liberty.
The Scottish government wants to modernise and consolidate the law on what people are permitted to say to each other. The Scottish administration’s Hate Crime and Public Order Bill, introduced in Holyrood last week, aims to extend considerably the category of banned speech. This should ring loud alarm bells.
At present, Scots hate-crime law largely parallels the English law (actually it is slightly narrower). It criminalises the stirring up of racial hatred by any behaviour that is threatening, abusive or insulting, and it requires heavier sentencing for a number of crimes if they are aggravated by hostility towards the victim’s race, religion, disability, sexual orientation or transgender status. Unlike English law, however, Scots law does not yet penalise the stirring up of anti-religious or anti-gay hatred.
In 2017, the SNP government decided this had to change. It appointed Lord Bracadale, a far from libertarian Scottish appeal judge, to review the matter. His spectacularly hardline report was published a year later. Based on this report, Holyrood now proposes leaving racial-hatred law largely alone while introducing, in effect, three new offences.
Read also: Scotland Swaps One Blasphemy Law for Another by Madeleine Kearns, National Review
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