Now we must resist the Scottish Nationalists' assault on political freedom

By redefining criticism as "hatred", Scottish Nationalists are criminalising everyone who rejects their troubling ideology of child sexualisation, fictional sexes, and racial and religious conflict.

Man conspicuously refusing to give Nazi salute—1936

ON 1ST APRIL 2024—April Fool’s Day—Scotland’s regional administration entered the next phase of its wholesale assault on the political freedom of Scotland’s citizens.

For several years, it has been advancing an ideological program characterised by a deeply troubling obsession with sexualising children, the confection and amplification of social conflict rooted in fictionalised sexual, racial, and religious grievances, and a pre-scientific understanding of mammalian biology.

Given the strength of public opposition to the repellent program of policies generated from this febrile mix, the administration is now directing considerable effort toward the preparation of measures for suppressing popular dissent.

One set of suppressive legislation criminalises opposition by parents, health workers, and pastoral care workers to its ideology of indoctrinating and sexualising school children, and coercing school children without parents’ knowledge into dangerous and irreversible experimental procedures designed to harm their sexual development. Under proposals submitted by the extremist interest group to which the regional authority has outsourced its legislative responsibility, penalties include taking children into state custody, custodial sentences of up to seven years, stripping professionals of their livelihoods, and stripping charitable institutions of their tax privileges.¹

Another set strips citizens accused of serious crimes—possibly falsely—of their ancient right to trial by a jury of their peers, subjecting them instead to political trial behind closed doors before a judge selected by the administration and operating to ideologically motivated conviction quotas.²

However, the measures currently passing from preparation into imposition that are the subject of this essay are contained in the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021³ which came into force on April 1st 2024 (“The Act”, below).

Existing legislation reasonably and adequately protects from prejudice people with characteristics over which they have no control, such as race, and disability. The Act extends and weaponises this legislation to create an instrument through which any legitimate criticism of the administration’s policies and the contested and troubling liberal-progressive ideology that underpins them can be criminalised.

It does so in large part by arbitrarily redefining criticism as “hatred”, thereby bringing mere criticism within the scope of laws intended to combat actual hatred. Then it extends the scope of the law from the public domain into the private domain, criminalising thought and speech expressed in the privacy of a citizen’s own home.

Policing thought and opinion expressed in private is a problem inherent in Fascism, which Fascist states have solved through the mechanism of “citizen surveillance”. The Act establishes a citizen surveillance and reporting network throughout Scotland to encourage and enable suitably motivated citizens to report prohibited speech to the Police. Police Scotland—forced through funding cuts to abandon the detection and investigation of entire categories of actual crime—is nevertheless authorised and instructed to investigate every such report of imaginary crime.⁴

The police record of anyone so investigated will be amended through a novel instrument callled the “non-hate crime”. Police records are searchable by potential employers, and this provision confers on malicious actors the power to significantly degrade the ability of a Scottish citizen to participate in society even when they fail to secure a conviction for criticism.

By definition and design, anyone criticising this Law and the ideology it is designed to shield from criticism is exposed to the risk of malicious prosecution for “hatred”. Nevertheless, consider the following arguments, each of which is a legitimate criticism of state ideology from a different perspective:

[1]

Mammalian biology is well understood and non-negotiable. Mammals are sexually dimorphic at the genetic level. A mammal’s sex is determined at the moment of conception, it cannot be altered, and is never observed spontaneously to change. It is expressed in every cell in a mammal’s body and, by inspecting any cell in its body, the sex of a mammal can be determined with a probability approaching 100%.⁵

Humans are mammals. Since a human’s sex cannot be changed, the administration’s claim that the sex of a human is arbitrary and changeable at will is scientifically meaningless. Therefore, all of its policies that derive from that claim—which is to say, the greater part of its so-called “transgender” ideology—are also meaningless, and should be set aside.⁶

[2]

The regional administration argues that “criticism” is somehow indistinguishable from “hatred”. It does not argue—because it cannot—that “hatred” is indistinguishable from physical violence, or that the experience of “hatred” is somehow categorically worse than the experience of physical violence. Therefore, where elimination of both cannot be achieved, a policy that prioritised prevention of “hatred” over prevention of physical violence would be absurd.

Women are disproportionately at risk of physical violence from men, and that risk is greatest in spaces in which women are unobserved or in an intimate state. To mitigate this risk, society establishes spaces for women from which men are excluded. Since any physical violence experienced by a woman is self-evidently worse than any “hatred” experienced by a man, the claim that a man so excluded from such a space experiences “hatred”—even if it was meaningful—is irrelevant to the determination of the policy of women-only spaces. And any policy based on that claim is therefore absurd and should be set aside.

[3]

A man enjoying the protection of the Act under one of its fictional sex categories might invite another person to enter into the fiction that he is, in fact, a woman. However, at least one of the religions also protected from criticism by the Act takes a bracingly robust view about such an invitation, for example devoting a considerable amount of theological scholarship—now protected from criticism—to the issue of how best to execute homosexuals.

Contained within the Act, therefore, is the recursive absurdity of plaintiff A, protected under the Act from plaintiff B’s claim that they are “an abomination”, accusing plaintiff B of hatred while plaintiff B, also protected under the act from plaintiff A’s claim that he is a member of an intolerant medieval cult, accuses plaintiff A of hatred, forcing the police to abandon investigation of theft and vandalism to a fruitless investigation of both grievances.

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These are legitimate and self-evident criticisms of the manifest absurdities and internal contradictions contained in the regional administration’s ill-conceived ideology and related law. There are many others. None of them express “hatred” in any sense that prevailed until recently. Yet it is now possible in Scotland to be prosecuted for these criticisms of the administration’s ideology under the claim that they are.

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The rapid transformation of Germany’s Weimar Republic into the the horror of the Nazi regime is a mystery. Until, that is, you understand the mechanism though which Fascism arises and takes hold.⁷ While the final form that a Fascist states takes varies significantly, they all share one common feature: at an early stage, and as the enabler for subsequent acquisition and consolidation of power, they all actively destroy the bonds of trust that exist between citizens.

It’s these bonds that allow us to sit together at our dinner tables and say: “I don’t agree with this policy. What do you think?”, “Have you heard what they are doing to the [insert group]?”, and “This is repellant. We should organise ourselves to resist these people before it is too late”.

The Act significantly strengthens and emboldens extremist activists who do not wish us or our children well. It erodes our confidence in the rule of law, and in the competence and impartiality of the police. Above all else, it erodes the trust between us upon which the proper functioning of our society, and our immunity from the techniques of fascist manipulation, depends.

You might be tempted to dismiss all of this as “the looney left”, assume that the pendulum of common sense will eventually swing back, and look the other way. I’d like respectfully to suggest that this would be a mistake.

Are the Scottish National Party crypto-fascists? I don’t know, but I doubt it.⁸ It is true that the hatred of Britain that some SNP members shared with Nazi Germany, and their admiration of its authoritarian methods, led to their regrettable collaboration with it. It’s also true that some of its supporters today would vote for a horse if doing so delivered their political goal. In deciding whether something is cock-up or conspiracy, though, I’m influenced by Napoleon, who claimed that he wasn’t concerned about conspiracy amongst his generals as they were much too incompetent to carry it out. And SNP’s incompetence is breath taking.

But I think that’s the wrong question. Here in Britain, at a terrifying rate, we are installing the mechanisms by which a Fascist entity could seize power in the future. Why would we allow that?

I believe that we should not allow it. How? By saying, collectively: “We withhold our consent to your attempt to remove our freedom”. By taking every opportunity to preserve and strengthen the social bonds between us, and by using that strength daily to expose and ridicule their grotesque ideology. And by never being afraid to speak out publicly—and privately—against Fascism’s precursors.

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Edinburgh

1. Behrens, Paul. 2022. ‘Expert Advisory Group on Ending Conversion Practices: Report and Recommendations’. http://www.gov.scot/publications/expert-advisory-group-ending-conversion-practices-report-recommendations/.

2. Scottish Legal News. ‘Law Society Hits out at Juryless Trials’, 11 September 2023. https://www.scottishlegal.com/articles/law-society-hits-out-at-juryless-trials.

3. ‘Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021’. Text. Statute Law Database. Accessed 30 March 2024. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/asp/2021/14/contents. The extent of the over-reach contained in the Act is so unprecedented that it has taken 3 years for Police Scotland to work out how to enforce it.

4. Sanderson, Daniel. ‘Police Scotland Admits Investigation Policy Risks Helping Criminals’. The Telegraph, 24 March 2024. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/03/24/police-scotland-aberdeen-crime-investigation-policy/.

5. Simmons, Michael J., and D. Peter Snustad. 2006. Principles of Genetics. John Wiley & Sons.

6. I’ve yet to meet a proponent of the notion that I can be free to claim that I know what it feels like to be a woman even though I am physically not one and therefore to declare that I am one who can explain why I am not therefore also free to declare that I am black, or geriatric, or fat, or blue eyed, even though I’m not physically any of those things either.

7. For excellent and very relevant surveys, see for example: Arendt, H. 1951. The Origins of Totalitarianism. or Hoffer, E. 1951. The True Believer.

8. I think that some of the extremist groups that have infiltrated the administration and now direct policy formulation from within it might find Fascism’s authoritarianism highly attractive.