I hate, you hate, he hates, anyone who doesn't hate is stupid... It's only been two weeks since a new law came into force in Scotland to protect all types of minorities (trans, homosexuals, elderly or disabled people, blacks, Asians...) from the attacks of which they are frequently victims, and the police have been overwhelmed by a tsunami of accusations.
The intention of the law promoted by nationalist Prime Minister Humza Yousaf, and approved by the Holyrood Parliament, was undoubtedly good, but its sponsors did not expect it to be used for personal and political vendettas, which is what is happening. If someone has a dispute with another, demand that they incite hatred by singing, and that they defend themselves however they can.
The avalanche of accusations is so impressive – eight thousand in the first week alone – that the police have warned that they cannot cope and that at this rate they will only be able to dedicate themselves to investigating the hatred of some Scots against others, without time for murders, rapes , robberies, armed robberies and all other crimes listed in the Criminal Code (Scotland has its own Napoleonic justice system, independent of the English). From the outset, the agents' vacations have been canceled.
In 2023, a total of 416,000 crimes were reported in the country. If the current rate of more than thirty thousand hate allegations per month is maintained, accusations for that crime will be more than for all the others combined (until now, the most common was assault, 58,000 a year), an aberration that does not exist. It was foreseen by the politicians when modifying the law.
Since April 1, there has been a new crime of “threatening, abusive or insulting conduct with the purpose of encouraging hatred for reasons of age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity or variations in sexual characteristics.” A Scottish law on gender identity very similar to the Spanish one was struck down a few months ago by the Supreme Court.
The flood of accusations of incitement to hatred occurs in a context of cuts in the number of police officers (the lowest in fifteen years) and the closure of 29 police stations, when crimes considered minor (such as car thefts, of apartments and shops) are not even investigated. The authorities have warned that at this rate they will not have the resources to fight terrorism and organized crime, and that the mafias will run rampant.
The opposition feels vindicated because it had warned that the new anti-hate law was too vague in terms of the definition of the crime, without going into details of what "threatening or abusive conduct" is, and giving rise to a very lax interpretation on the part of citizens eager to tickle neighbors or people with whom they disagree politically (the division between unionists and independentists has created fractures even within families for a decade). While the SNP considers the law progressive, the conservatives see it as an authoritarian drift.
The idea was to stop incidents such as street insults against transsexuals, veiled women, men holding hands, people in wheelchairs, Pakistanis and Catholics, or the destruction of rainbow flags in inclusive cafes frequented by the LGBTQ community.
For her part, the Scottish writer J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books, is one of the harshest critics of this new law and has challenged the police to stop her. There are radical elements of the trans community who accuse her on social networks of “inciting the hate” for claiming that to be a woman it is not enough to say so and denounce the presence in prisons and women's locker rooms of men who identify as women.
Feminists critical of the new gender identity policies, for whom sex is fundamentally a biological fact, feel “unprotected” by the new law and see their freedom of expression threatened if, for expressing their opinions, they can be denounced for “inciting.” to hate.” Intellectuals also see the danger that any joke or joke about transsexuals could be considered a crime. The police have clarified that Rowling's opinions do not constitute a crime.
