Scotland's Hate Crime Law

A short speech outside Holyrood

I was asked to say a few words at the funeral for free speech held at Holyrood on April 1st 2024, to mark the commencement of police enforcement of hate speech laws in Scotland.

This is what I said:

Ladies and Gentlemen, we are gathered here to mourn the passing of freedom in our land.

We cannot know how this new Hate Crime Act will be applied, nor can we know exactly who will be targeted first. For that is the way of the total state.

Pastor Martin Niemoller knew this when he wrote the poem “First they Came for”

The UK Supreme Court , when striking down another SNP attack on liberty – the Creepy Orwellian Child-watching scheme called Named Person, also knew this for they said:

The first thing that a totalitarian regime tries to do is to get at the children, to distance them from the subversive, varied influences of their families, and indoctrinate them in their rulers’ view of the world.

So who will our politicised police, and the institutionally corrupt Crown Office come after first?

It could be any of us. It could be a man who might call a politician a name. It could be a children’s author who might call a biological male a man. It could be the owner of a nursery school who refuses a place for the child of the politically powerful. That is the thing with the fascist system, you never know who will be its target. So everyone feels the fear. And many become informers.

In times characterised by wisdom, the law is a simple thing, it can reside in the human heart and be expressed in few words:

Love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.

and

Love thy neighbour as thyself.

But Humza’s new law is mysterious; unknowable; unpredictable. It will be used to indoctrinate our people in our rulers view of the world. And, when our rulers talk grandiloquently of their values, remember that by this they mean their resentful, narrow, materialistic and bitter worldview — the ideology to which they demand that we all swear fealty.

And why do they do this? Because they hate our nation. For a nation is like a family. It has the strength to encompass differences. It understands patience, and love and loyalty and duty. It inspires courage and grants dignity. It does not do this by means of imposing uniformity, nor by controlling thought, or manipulating emotions or generating fear. Rather it inspires a voluntary and loving commitment by each individual man and woman.

Humza cannot inspire. So instead he imposes; he coerces; he bullies; he threatens.

That is what the Hate Crime bill is – a means of coercion. A means of silencing dissent using the police. This bill exists because its authors’ ideas are corrupt and so they seek darkness to cover up their evil. Truth is to be criminalised, honesty is to be outlawed, thought is to be suppressed.

Ladies and gentlemen, although our law has fallen into the long sleep, let not our hearts do likewise.

Let us resist.

We can do this in many simple ways:

• We can never miss an opportunity to tell the truth

• We can always and everywhere reject lies

• We can decide not to live in to fear

• And we can love one-another.

If we can do this, we can yet make the evil represented by this pernicious law irrelevant  by the simple step of choosing a better law of our own free will.                          

Thankyou