When the Scottish government brought the Hate Crime & Public Order Act into force on April 1, all champions of free speech slammed it, for the legislation is an egregious assault on the freedom of expression. Reeking of woke garbage, the new law has been typically supported by Left-leaning individuals and media platforms and opposed by free speech enthusiasts, the most prominent among them being best-selling author J.K. Rowling and the American tycoon Elon Musk.
The new law stipulates that a person commits an offence if they communicate material, or behave in a manner, “that a reasonable person would consider to be threatening or abusive,” intended to stir up hatred based on the protected characteristics of age, sexual orientation, transgender persons, race, religion, social or cultural group, etc. The maximum penalty is a jail sentence of seven years.
There is already a law, the Public Order Act 1986, to check stirring up hatred based on race, sexual orientation, and religion in Great Britain; the new act in Scotland lowers the bar for such offences by including “insulting” behavior. Now, the prosecution just has to say that stirring up hatred was “likely” rather than “intended.”
The law adds a subjective dimension to hate crime, as the supposedly offended person only has to “consider” the alleged offender’s communication or conduct to be offensive.
Scotland’s new law is in line with the Left’s jihad against freedom of expression in the West. This jihad is manifested in various forms—from focusing on ‘micro-aggressions’ and magnifying the threat of white supremacists to maligning the Western civilization and corrupting language with politically correct phraseology.
Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf, leading the assault on free speech, was Justice Secretary when the act was passed back in 2021, said at that time, “Through the passing of this landmark Bill, Parliament has sent a strong and clear message to victims, perpetrators, communities and to wider society that offences motivated by prejudice will be treated seriously and will not be tolerated.”
On the face of it, his statement sounded good, but the problem is that Yousaf, who is of Pakistani origin, himself holds racist views. In a 2020 speech, he infamously accused Scotland of racism, asserting that only white people occupy high offices. Now in a country where over 95 per cent people are white, that is quite natural. By the way, how many non-Muslims hold prominent posts in Pakistan?
Under the new law, many complaints were made against Humza’s racist speech. His government’s response to the complaints was as shameless as it was hypocritical. Community Safety Minister Siobhian Brown lamented that people were making “fake and vexatious complaints.”
The Leftwing media is providing cover fire to the Scotland government. A major platform willfully described the complainants against Humza as “new-Nazis.” In short, anyone who is critical of the Left’s racist policies is a neo-Nazi.
Rowling is among those who are incensed by the new hate crime law. She not just slammed the law but also offered herself as a kind of human shield to common people by daring the Scottish government to prosecute her. She went on to call 10 persons who identify themselves as trans women as men on X. The list included a convicted rapist, sex offenders, and high-profile activists. “Freedom of speech and belief are at an end in Scotland if the accurate description of biological sex is deemed criminal,” she said.
Yousaf got cold feet by the pushback; he refused to prosecute her. He said, “J.K. Rowling’s tweets may well be offensive, upsetting and insulting to trans people. But it doesn’t mean that they meet a threshold of criminality of being threatening or abusive and intending to stir up hatred.”
While Rowling and some other Western intellectuals have the courage to take on the enemies of freedom, there is hardly any Indian thought leader who has the gumption to fight for free speech. For decades, Indian intellectuals obsequiously obeyed the dictates of mad mullahs, be it the hounding of Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen or the vandalism by a violent Muslim mob at a newspaper office in Bangalore. Having lost credibility and moral courage, their arguments against the depredations of the saffron brigade sound hollow and lack conviction.
Nothing exemplifies liberals’ duplicity as Congress leader and prominent author Shashi Tharoor’s diametrically opposite views on the subject in a span of around one year. In a debate with the English-American public intellectual Christopher Hitchens in 2007 (which is available on Youtube), Tharoor defended the right of the state to curtail free speech in order to maintain law and order. He said, “It’s where what you say, or write, or paint or do other things which cause such a grievous offence to a section of people in society in which you live that the society will be jeopardized…”
In other words, we should not offend any section of society, however retrograde or violent it may be. He went on the elaborate on this matter: “I told you about an anecdote about two years ago from India when a Bangalore newspaper in the Sunday magazine section published a story called ‘Muhammad the idiot’ which was about a retarded boy called Muhammad. Of course, the title was enough to inflame a mob of very, very angry people who stormed the newspaper, trashed the office, broke up the press. And I have to tell you that many fans of democracy and freedom of speech didn’t have much sympathy for the newspaper (emphasis added). It was really that they ought to have known better—that was the attitude.”
In June 2008, however, Tharoor defended Husain’s right to paint a picture which offended many Hindus.
In the West, there are authors and celebrities like Rowling and Musk to defend free speech. In our country, unfortunately, we have the likes of Tharoor whose tendentious views and double standards are a threat to freedom of expression.
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