For a piece of legislation intended to dissuade hatred, the Hate Crime Act sure has a lot of people at each other’s throats.
Douglas Ross was fit to be tied that Police Scotland’s officers were only receiving two hours of online training ahead of the law coming into force on April Fool’s Day. (Sometimes the jokes just write themselves.)
Humza Yousaf, architect of the Act, complained that ‘a lot of disinformation about the Hate Crime Act has been spread on social media, in inaccurate media reporting and by our political opponents’.
It’s not the Scottish Government that’s wrong about the law’s likely impact, it’s everyone writing, researching and analysing it.
Sneer: Mr Yousaf had venom in his tone
The First Minister’s voice hinted at his displeasure with these people. Not to worry, Humza. After April 1, you can probably have them locked up.
Yousaf took the wind out of Ross’s sails by quoting supportive comments about the law from Adam Tomkins, the former Tory MSP who teaches law at Glasgow University.
Ross returned serve by quoting critical remarks from Alistair Bonnington, who used to teach law at Glasgow University.
Things have changed since I was at Glasgow. Back then the fiercest argument was whether to get smashed at Jim’s Bar (better music) or the Beer Bar (better ale).
Mr Bonnington’s regular interventions on misguided SNP policy are very welcome, though he did teach law to Nicola Sturgeon, so perhaps they should be taken as a form of penance.
The First Minister’s fury was rising. The Tories, he thundered, had ‘actively created the conditions for hatred and division to thrive in our society’.
It was the party of ‘go-home vans’, of ‘the hostile environment’, of Windrush, and of Boris Johnson, who had insulted Muslim women.
It was a party that ‘indulges in Islamophobic smears’, citing Suella Braverman and Lee Anderson as examples.
The more he denounced the hate-mongering Tories, over the Presiding Officer’s attempts to rein him in, the more venomous the First Minister’s tone grew, until he was spitting out every word like battery acid. Uh oh, someone let the Hate Monster in.
That’s something we’re not supposed to do anymore. Unfortunately, Police Scotland didn’t get the memo.
Their awareness campaign pins the blame for hate crimes on ‘young men aged 18-30’ who have ‘feelings of being socially and economically disadvantaged combined with ideas about white-male entitlement’.
Police Scotland haven’t just let the Hate Monster in, they’ve commissioned him to do some racial profiling.
Ivan McKee, a sensible sort who perhaps joined the SNP after losing a bet, complained that Police Scotland’s website ‘explicitly stereotypes young working-class men from constituencies like mine’.
He warned that ‘publicly demonising that disadvantaged group’ wasn’t helpful.
Yousaf agreed. It was ‘exceptionally important that there is no stigmatisation of any communities whatsoever’. After all, the point of the Act was ‘to ensure a more cohesive society, as opposed to one that pits one community against another’.
Which only goes to prove you can pass an entire Bill without ever reading it.
The First Minister was getting it in the neck from all sides. Labour lefty Pauline McNeill raised concerns the legislation would be ‘used maliciously to silence legitimate opinion’, thus ‘criminalising innocent people and further stretching police resources’.
Yousaf trotted out a familiar formulation: ‘I know that Pauline McNeill takes the issue of tackling hatred very seriously.’
He says this a lot in that patronising sneer. The implication is that, while your views are trash in the First Minister’s eyes, he kindly recognises that you hold them in good faith.
You could travel the length of this great little country and encounter not one person who gives two hoots what a dangerously over-promoted midwit like Humza Yousaf thinks about their views or their intentions. May that ever be the case.
