Scotland’s sweeping new ‘hate crime’ law, designed to protect a wide range of individuals (except women) from hatred, came into effect on Monday.
The Hate Crime and Public Order Act, under which police have even been told to target ‘hateful’ comedians, has received criticism from almost all quarters of Britain’s political society. Even The Guardian insisted that officials “should not stymie public debate,” despite noting that the law might well be “well intentioned.”
But Scotland’s first minister and leader of the hard-left Scottish National Party, Humza Yousaf, said it was required to deal with a “rising tide of hatred.”
The legislation creates a new crime of “stirring up hatred” against a range of groups. These are defined by age, disability, faith, sexual orientation, transgender identity or being intersex. However, the law does not seek to protect women.
Scottish author of the Harry Potter series J.K. Rowling offered a stinging criticism of the law on Monday, accusing SNP lawmakers of placing “higher value on the feelings of men performing their idea of femaleness, however misogynistically or opportunistically, than on the rights and freedoms of actual women and girls.”
In a post on X, she described a list of transgender individuals, including convicted sex offenders, as men, and invited police officers to “arrest me” if “what I’ve written here qualifies as an offence under the terms of the new act.”
Rowling also warned that the legislation is “wide open” to abuse by trans activists who wish to silence supporters of single-sex spaces for women and girls. Reports suggest that the SNP government is “expected” to include protection for women against hatred in a separate misogyny law “later.”
A less hard-hitting message from UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak noted that he agrees “people should not be criminalised for stating simple facts on biology.”
Writing in Spiked Online, Irish comedian Graham Linehan offered perhaps the most positive spin on the news of this law coming into effect; that it is “so unworkable … [it] will surely send Humza Yousaf clattering into the same bin currently inhabited by his predecessor, Nicola Sturgeon, who was similarly undone by her capitulation to trans ideology.”
