Been guilty of a hate incident? Possibly - but you'll never know

Even before the Hate Crime Act comes into force politicians are being recorded for "non crime hate incidents"

As the days tick by until the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act is finally enacted, there has been a determined effort to deny that it will have any chilling effect on free speech. Nor do individuals, like gender critical women, need to worry that they will be pursued by trans activists. Humza Yousaf, backed by Glasgow University academics like Professor Adam Tomkins and Andrew Tickell, insist that the fuss about the Hate Crime and Public Order Act is all a bit overdone. It’s not that big a deal.

The act we’re told, just tidies up hate legislation already on the books. There are specific protections for freedom of speech and the expression of robust opinions. To prove that someone has “stirred up hatred”. the new stand alone hate crime, a “reasonable person” would have to agree that the speech in question - and it is very much speech we are talking about here - would amount to “threatening and abusive behaviour”. (I will deal with this concept of a “reasonable person” in a future post)

Only there has been a deafening silence from the academic cheerleaders at the discovery - not really a discovery since this column has been pointing it up for months - that even before the Hate Crime legislation is enacted, innocent people are quite outrageously being recorded as perpetrators of “hate incidents” without their knowledge and without any actual crime being committed. There are thousands of these being handed out every year, yet it has only now become an issue because the hate net captured a Conservative MSP, Murdo Fraser.