The Scottish National Party is implementing legislation to classify age-related derogatory remarks as potential hate crimes. Fraser Hudghton of the Free Speech Union gives his take in the Scottish Mail on Sunday.
At a railway station outside Edinburgh this week I saw a sign stating “…will not be tolerated”. That particular instruction was for trespassers daft enough to risk getting smashed like a tomato with a baseball bat by a racing train if they opted for the live track shortcut instead of the stairs. That seems a worthwhile warning.
Unfortunately, it isn’t just railway trespassers that aren’t tolerated north of the Border. This intolerance now extends to vast swathes of our language.
The Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 sent a zinging message to trespassers upon our collective moral compass. The Act’s purpose is to ensure anyone deemed to breach the assigned ethos of ‘modern Scotland’ by expressing certain taboo views faces prosecution. From 2024, we now learn, any derogatory references to a person’s age will become a hate crime. TV comedy Still Game will probably be sent down the memory hole. Fat Boab will follow, as will Wee Jimmy Krankie (not least because it’s become a nickname for our troubled ex-First Minister).
My three children all called me ‘fat’ last week and I suppose I ought to have had a proper talk with them about how it won’t be tolerated. If they become repeat offenders I will march them down to the local police station.
Scotland has become a finger-wagging, moralistic place, although that’s nothing new. We were superstars at roasting women alive in barrels of tar, fabulous at railing against their ‘monstrous regiment’ and we have always excelled at telling the English to ‘get out’.
A couple of years ago the Free Speech Union helped a Scot, living in England, who’d had her business nuked due to a ludicrous complaint of ‘transphobic’ language at a dinner party she hosted in her home – i.e. she questioned whether a woman could have a penis. In Scotland she might have faced prosecution.
The addition of ‘ageism’ to the list of thought crimes contained in the Hate Crime Act – which has yet be to be activated because, I suspect, Police Scotland has told the Scottish Government that it just doesn’t have the resources to deal with the deluge of reports – is entirely predictable.
The gulf between the SNP and reality grows ever wider. If the Hate Crime Act is ever activated, banned books will include A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (for ‘cripple’), Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck (the n-word) and Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (for pretty much everything in it). The behaviour no longer tolerated will include saucy jokes in pubs, compliments paid to the opposite sex and interesting conversations with anyone, ever.
On the flip side, Mhairi Black, the Nationalist MP soon to retire at 28, may not wish to repeat her words this week that opponents of gender ideology are “50 year-old Karens”.
If that doesn‘t merit a crime report by Police Scotland for ageism, what would?
Worth reading in full.
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