Free society a myth under Stalinist Sturgeon’s hate crime laws

Nicola Stalin’s Stasi state has claimed another victim. The founder of Brodie’s Trust, which supports women who have lost a baby to domestic violence or forced abortion, Nicola Murray, was visited by Scottish police investigating a tweet she had published last September.

In it she had stated she would no longer refer clients to the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre after its chief executive Mridul Wadhwa, a trans woman and former SNP parliamentary candidate, said on a podcast that victims of sexual violence should expect to be “challenged on their prejudices” if they expressed “bigoted” views. Murray posted a message on Twitter describing those remarks as “deeply concerning” and stated that Brodie’s Trust would no longer refer women to the centre. Her tweet emphasised the role of Brodie’s Trust as “a women-only service”.

For this she was reported to the police, who visited her Perthshire home last October and, despite conceding there was no question of a crime having been committed, said that they wanted to “ascertain her thinking”. That is identical to the experience of Harry Miller, himself a former police officer, in Lincolnshire in 2019, who was telephoned by Humberside Police after he had re-tweeted a limerick about trans women. The police officer told him he needed “to check your thinking”. This is, quite literally, the Thought Police.

Harry Miller won an important victory in the High Court when the police action was declared illegal. In the Scottish case, the situation was aggravated by Assistant Chief Constable Gary Ritchie saying that “hate crime and discrimination of any kind is deplorable and entirely unacceptable”, interpreted as a condemnation of Murray. For this, Police Scotland has now been reported to the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) by the campaign group Fair Play for Women, which claims the remark puts Police Scotland in breach of a legal obligation to “promote understanding” between protected groups.

From a public interest perspective, the question arises: why were police investigating a non-crime? Had they solved all the actual crimes? Indeed no. The Scottish police, in recording their stewardship of law and order, tend to highlight “crime clear up rates”. One might wonder why they elect to do so, considering that, in 2019-2020, the clear up rate for Scottish crime was an underwhelming 51.5 per cent, meaning that almost half of Scottish crimes remained unsolved.

However, this preference becomes understandable when the basic crime statistics for 2019-2020 are reduced to raw figures: 246,516 crimes were committed, but only 75,251 convictions secured. Those numbers expose the reality behind the so-called clear up figures, since clear ups include cases where no one has come within a mile of a court, whereas conviction statistics tell the stark truth.

So, with such a woeful performance record, how can Police Scotland afford to pursue non-crimes? Even some of Scotland’s finest have misgivings about that. The General Secretary of the Scottish Police Federation, Calum Steele, said last year: “We should be policing crime, not feelings. It adds to the police workload and smacks of George Orwell, Big Brother and Nineteen Eighty-Four.”

By the time he voiced that complaint, more than 3,300 “non-crime” hate cases had been recorded in Scotland over the previous five years. These so-called “hate incidents” are required to be recorded, regardless of whether there is evidence of “malice and ill-will”, under Police Scotland’s Hate Crime Standard Operating Procedure. Those records, just like real criminal records, could exclude those named from employment and constitute a clear breach of human rights. When the police can treat a casual remark, often a joke, in this way, it is a travesty to suggest we still live in a free society.

Last year the ratchet of tartan totalitarianism was turned a further notch with the passing of the SNP’s Hate Crime Bill, a milestone in all-embracing state repression. Under its terms people can be prosecuted and imprisoned for remarks passed in what was formerly the privacy of their own homes. Domestic privacy, the “dwelling defence”, is the one red line the state should never cross; yet it has done so. A Conservative amendment to exempt conversation in people’s homes from prosecution was rejected, so this monument to SNP totalitarianism stands. Edward Longshanks would have loved it, William Wallace not so much.

So, now it is open season for Young Pioneers to denounce their parents (“Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for my happy childhood!”). How appropriate that George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four in Scotland. Any remarks that offend against a proliferating number of taboos, invented by cranks suffixing “phobic” to ever more absurd neologisms, can result in prosecution. It is well for the SNP that Scotland is not independent, since a sovereign state imposing so extravagant a level of repression on its people would drop like a stone down the Universal Human Rights Index.

This alarming descent into dictatorship must be reversed. Scotland is still part of the United Kingdom. The UK Supreme Court saved Scots from the SNP’s notorious Named Person scheme, which would have given a government-appointed busybody higher authority over children than their parents: state appropriation of children and marginalisation of parents is the litmus test of a totalitarian society. Surely some superior court can strike down this toxic law and restore human rights to Scotland?

That said, the rest of the United Kingdom is only one step behind Scotland in imposing tyranny – the beleaguered Johnson government is actually preparing to enact further hate crime laws, when a supposedly Conservative administration should be erasing all of them from the statute book. The concept of “hate” crime is totally subjective, an anti-democratic means of silencing opponents by coercion instead of argument. It invariably promotes the agenda of the Left.

So far as stirring up violence or intimidating minorities is concerned, there are long-standing laws which amply cover that crime. The creation of laws that suppress free speech was a grandstanding, virtue-signalling initiative whose consequence has been that, even under a Conservative government, right-of-centre opinion is censored while leftist views are not. The playing field is not only not level, it has been dug up. In England, more than 120,000 “hate incidents” remain in police records, some of them trivial and ridiculous to the point of insanity. Yet many people’s reputations and employment prospects are at risk.

The mentality behind a non-crime hate incident is: “We haven’t managed – yet – to make this a crime, but we’re going to sanction you just the same.” It is a symptom of the extraordinarily fast disintegration of all our traditional freedoms and of the woke dictatorship capturing all our institutions, including business corporations. The Scottish hate law was passed by 82 individuals, out of Scotland’s population of 5.5 million. No wonder growing numbers of people question whether parliamentary democracy is sustainable.

The brilliant Austrian political scientist and polymath Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, in his book, Liberty or Equality, insisted that democracy was undesirable because, no matter how seductive its short and medium-term manifestations might be, in the long term it invariably led to tyranny. Today, that analysis looks prescient. Who really rules us? Who voted for Stonewall?

In Brighton, the Green-controlled council is introducing Critical Race Theory into schools. Brainwashing youngsters into seeing everything through a prism of “race” and “white privilege” is so corrosive of society and community relations that it can only realistically be described as evil. Already 300 teachers have undergone training for “specific racial literacy-focused lessons” that will tell seven year-olds they are not “racially innocent”. This is America’s toxic rage invading Britain. What does the Government propose to do about it?

But the most toxic phrase of all is “political correctness gone mad”. That suggests that yet another lunatic initiative has irritated us and, by these words, a token protest has been registered, after which we can turn to other things. It has effectively become a kind of ritual formula, like “La Reine le veut”, rubber-stamping a deeply damaging leftist aggression against a free society, in default of any means of reversing it. But, of course, there is a means of reversing it, as there was of reversing our membership of the European Union.

The roots of wokeness are already deeply embedded in British society; but so were the roots of the EU. Wokeness only advances because it has the sanction of the law. Those ill-considered laws must be repealed, beginning with Gordon Brown’s Equalities Act 2010. The notion of “aggravated offences” is alien to British jurisprudence: the motive for a crime is crucial in its detection and in securing a conviction, but it should be irrelevant to sentencing. Why should assaulting an able-bodied individual with “protected characteristics” (in itself a deplorable act) entail a much heavier sentence than assaulting an elderly woman?

By a process of osmosis, a complex hierarchy of privilege and disadvantage has come into existence; after a millennium of struggle to achieve equality under the law, we have regressed to a system of unequal legal status, reminiscent of the days when Norman barons enjoyed immense privileges over Saxon churls. Unless the Conservatives can find the courage to sweep away the whole woke imposition, the public will turn, as they did over Brexit, to an alternative political party that promises to restore their freedoms. Whether the Bravehearts in Scotland will have the backbone to free themselves of Nicola Stalin and her nomenklatura is another question.