The SNP’s hate crime u-turn isn’t enough

‘Is that all there is?’ a dejected Peggy Lee mused in her sixties jazz number of the same name. Humza Yousaf’s statement in the Scottish parliament this afternoon left me musing along much the same lines, and no less dejectedly. The SNP justice minister had come to Holyrood with a peace offering for opponents of his hate crime bill, but it turned out to be half a piece at most. Such is the bill’s authoritarian overreach, it has prompted an unlikely alliance between Catholics and secularists, cops and lawyers, and, even more remarkably in Scotland, nationalists and unionists. 

The draft legislation proposes to create a new offence of ‘stirring up hatred’ against a list of protected characteristics: ‘race, colour, nationality (including citizenship), or ethnic or national origins; […] age; disability; religion, or, in the case of a social or cultural group, perceived religious affiliation; sexual orientation; transgender identity; variations in sex characteristics’. 

In the case of race, hatred is stirred up when a person ‘behaves in a threatening, abusive or insulting manner’ or ‘communicates’ such material, though the prohibition on ‘insulting’ speech and conduct is dropped for the other characteristics.