Newsnight discussion on Scotland's new Hate Crime Bill with Lucy Blackburn Hunter

[IwantToRetire]

Discussion on the implications of this Bill with the emphasis on how sex is NOT one of the characteristics covered.

Lucy Blackburn Hunter (hope I've got the name right) was invited to comment. Someone from SNP also commented but they did not speak directly to each other.

I thought it terms of the BBC it was quite a straight forward representation of why women are concerned.

Starts at about 18:45 into the programme. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001xj63/newsnight-can-the-rwanda-bill-save-sunak

Whether by coincidence or to appear "balanced" then a long segment on the length of time those refered to gender identity clinics have to wait, and number of suicides. Somehow this item did not mention at all that the Tavistock was closing and why.

That SNP guy was blinking and stuttering like he was being held hostage. In a cupboard.

I’d vote for Lucy

And this SNP person (who knows their bender!) was very keen to say women had not need to worry because even if the police were to receive a complaint about misgendering or transphobia, they would never act on it.

It didn't sound plausible and this article about recent police training suggests they most certainly will.

Police accused of parodying JK Rowling with ‘Jo’, who thinks trans people should go to gas chambers

Scottish force invents the fictional gender-critical character to illustrate a ‘scenario’ at session on hate crime

Quite long article in Telegraph here https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/03/20/police-accused-of-attacking-jk-rowling-at-lgbt-event/

Assuming the article is factual both the trainers and the police are certainly showing their true colours when they think they are bahind closed doors.

Article can also be read here https://archive.ph/4cDbi

Haven't had time to read it in full but here is an article by Lucy Hunter Blackburn

The way the law will be enforced will come down to police guidance, which remains secret. We have had anxious hints, leaks and whispers from frontline officers who have their own concerns about what lies ahead. The main training resource is a two-hour online course which is ‘not fit for purpose’ according to David Kennedy, general secretary of the Scottish Police Federation. ‘We are asking officers to police a law that they are unprepared for,’ he says. ‘That’s where mistakes will happen.’ He regards the whole project as ‘a recipe for disaster’. One of the leaks from Police Scotland training shows that comics and actors may be in trouble. The guidance tells officers that ‘threatening and abusive’ material can be communicated ‘through public performance of a play’.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/scotlands-new-hate-crime-act-is-fraught-with-danger/

In case of paywall https://archive.ph/9zclz

Article using some SNP quotes from Newsnight interview
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/03/21/snp-admits-jk-rowling-could-be-targeted-new-hate-laws/

https://archive.ph/Iei35

women had not need to worry because even if the police were to receive a complaint about misgendering or transphobia, they would never act on it. How reassuring. Don't we all want to have bad laws nobody wants enforced and a police force not interested in enforcing laws?

I find it grimly hilarious that the politicians keep going on about how certain they are that the Scottish Police will follow the spirit of the law. What the politicians intended when they wrote the law is irrelevant; it’s the words on the page that count in the legal system.

Some police officers are very much of the mindset that they are the 'Personification of the Law', and others are total Jobsworths, and both types will investigate and charge under any law that they think they can make stick (they want to establish their authority and god help you if you stand up to them, they can’t tolerate ‘threats' to their authority).

Some judges are literalists, and other judges dislike poorly-drafted laws that require divining the 'intention' of the legislature, both types of judges will sentence based on the law as it’s written and it will end up ruining people’s lives.

Vaguely written laws like this new Hate Crimes Act are a godsend to the litigious, to activists and to overly zealous Police officers. I increasingly envy Americans their First Amendment speech rights.

Agree, and not only that, if the politicians dont want or think the police should include gender critical opinions are hate crimes, why didn't the write a law that said this clearly.

Of course one of the problems is that not only in Scotland by across the UK some women's groups have been very vocal in saying sex, ie women although a protected characteristic should not be covered by hate crime legislation.

And the politicians not only in this instance but in others have chosen to listen to them as though they are representative of all women.

I thought both Lucy and Victoria D were very clear but the SNP man talked gobbledygook. Presumably because the new act makes no sense.

Like the Offensive Behaviour at Football Matches Act (rescinded) the “named person” legislation, which appointed a state guardian to every child in the country (withdrawn), the latest act, devised when Humza Yousaf was justice secretary, is undeniably atrociously written. Its detractors point out that the characteristics protected under it include sexual orientation, transgender identity and “variations in sex characteristics” — but conspicuously do not include sex.

Ask analysts, however, and they will tell you that the debate has become too overwrought, and misinformed. Adam Tomkins, once Conservative convenor of the justice committee, helped to draw up the Hate Crime Bill and insists that its provisions are not a challenge to free speech or to women’s rights.

Tomkins, who returned to his day job as professor of public law at Glasgow University after the Holyrood election, pointed out that the Scottish legislation was in line with laws passed in England in 2006 and 2008 that made it an offence to “stir up” hatred either on religious grounds or on grounds of sexual orientation. Essentially, a cross-border legal anomaly would disappear from April 1, he said.

“Offensive speech is not criminalised by this legislation,” he added. “The new law is going to disappoint those transgender activists who think all acts of misgendering are instances of hateful transphobia, just as it is going to disappoint those culture warriors whose nightmarish vision is that the new law poses the greatest threat to free speech since the abolition of the Licensing Act.”

This kind of reasonable stuff is off limits when Rogan and Musk rule the roost. If the world has gone mad, critics will say that Scotland led the way.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/joe-rogan-elon-musk-and-jk-rowling-how-scotlands-culture-war-infected-the-west-0sv8gvg52

Not sure what the writer is trying to say. That things aren't as bad as some people are suggesting, and the problem is everyone became overly antagonistic in 2014 over Scottish Independence, and now just cant stop themselves?!

If interested can be read in full at https://archive.ph/7R62q

I find it grimly hilarious that the politicians keep going on about how certain they are that the Scottish Police will follow the spirit of the law. What the politicians intended when they wrote the law is irrelevant; it’s the words on the page that count in the legal system.

Considering how they have dealt with following the “spirit” of the term women, I would now want all laws and legal terms to be as clear and unarguable as humanly possible.

Secret guidance for the police?

Nothing sinister about that,move along wimmins.