The Farcical First Week of Scotland’s ‘Hate Crime’ Law

Everyone & their uncle is filing a 'hate crime' report with the SNP Gestapo, excuse me, I meant 'Police Scotland'. They're now into massive overtime trying to deal with the deluge. 

From The European Conservative

By Michael Curzon

Police received a year’s worth of hate crime reports in just seven days.

Police Scotland has been overwhelmed by a “deluge” of ‘hate crime’ reports in the week since the country’s new public order act came into effect.

The force’s commitment to investigate every report—currently totalling an average of 60 an hour—means that it is failing to solve an increasing number of shoplifting cases, sexual assaults, and car thefts, according to analysis by The Daily Telegraph.

Reporting on the legislation focused at first on Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, who pledged that if the police “go after any woman for simply calling a man a man, I’ll repeat that woman’s words and they can charge us both at once.” But it was soon revealed that more of the first 4,000 complaints related to Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf than to anyone else—a major and humiliating blow to the hard-left Scottish National Party administration.

The Guardian blamed “neo-Nazi and far-right agitators” for “exploiting” the hate crime act, despite one of its own writers previously urging officials against “stym[ying] public debate.”

Scottish MP Neale Hanvey is among those being investigated under the hate crime law. The Alba Party politician says this is likely because he has written online that “men are male, women are female,” and that “truth is not hate.” Hanvey described the legislation as

utterly ridiculous, illiberal, wasteful and unacceptable in a supposedly liberal democracy where political discourse should be free and open.

Campaigners say the legislation, which builds off protections that were already in place by making a new crime of “stirring up hatred” against a wide range of individuals (except women), is simply unworkable. The figures appear to back them up.

The roughly 8,000 complaints received in week one well exceeded the total of 6,927 in 2020-21 as a whole. And police are now “well into hundreds of thousands of pounds worth [of] over time,” The Sunday Times reports.

Amid suggestions that the number of hate crime reports is on course to outnumber all other offences put together, police say they simply “can’t cope.”

It doesn’t help that police are said to have received just two hours of online training for enforcing the act. Nor that even this, like the legislation as a whole, contains mistakes. Police Scotland appear to be “making it up as they go along,” one Tory Member of the Scottish Parliament said,

All the farce has prompted Toby Young’s Free Speech Union to launch a hotline for anyone arrested or contacted by the police under Scotland’s hate crime law. The Union says it has attracted 1,000 new Scottish members in recent weeks, showing that as amusing as the legislation’s failures may be, serious fears persist around its ability to do genuine harm.

While the thousands of reported ‘hate crimes’ may range from the silly to the serious, any offences that under a functioning jurisdiction would be considered truly criminal are already covered under previously existing laws, leaving the new law to handle—mostly hurt feelings.