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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The New Puritans!
Andrew Doyle got it right:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/New-Puritans-Religion-Justice-Captured/dp/B09VJ4XTQF/ref=tmm_aud_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1691945883&sr=1-1
Humza Yousaf is told he’s a “pestilence on the land” and addresses it as if it’s his colour rather than his leadership. If that’s his mindset, improvement is not to be expected but making criticism all about a “protected” characteristic clearly benefits those who do not want any form of debate.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/humza-yousaf-heckled-during-edinburgh-fringe-appearance/ar-AA1f9pp7
Hasn’t Sidiq Khan done the same thing and claimed he gets abused for being a Muslim rather than people hating his policies?
The new hate speech…
“Are you old? You look like my Nana, and she’s old.”
“Right, You’re nicked…”
Back in the old days ——————Oops excuse me officer
I sometimes call myself a silly old fool (increasingly frequently, sadly), should I report myself for a self hate crime?
I keep hitting my head on an ornate iron bracket near the front door of our new home. Today was the 83rd time, I think. The resulting epithets (not least the bruises on my head and right hand) have earned me the title of persistent self-hate crime offender. Thankfully we are in France these days and no-one understands me too well.
There may be the odd Scot around, though. I hadn’t thought of this until now. Wha wadna fecht fer Charlie?
Not that song, but let’s weep for what Scotland was…:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WgskbClWZ68
There is an interesting clash of ”isms and phobias” with all this. I understand many older people with cognitive problems cannot understand this whole trans business which never arose when they were younger. If someone goes trans in their family they get confused, where has Betty come from? where has Brian gone, they want to see Brian but cannot because Brian has become Betty!
Is it an ageist crime to expect old people to understand the trans business? Or are the old people being transphobic when they cannot understand the whole trans gender business and mis-gender people?
What a tangled web we weave when wokeist dogma we conceive.
You have implied
oldelderlypeople of advancing yearsgreater solar revolutionists can’t think straight. IT’S OFF TO THE GULAG FOR YOU, YOUNG FELLA MI LADDIEThere is no such thing as transphobic. It is a construct to try and normalise what is really abnormal behaviour. If there is a struggle to understand, it is why people who have been adults for a very short time (10 years or less), have managed to redesign our entire social and economic structures, based on folly and poor research and even poorer conclusions. This is especially true of teenagers who despite no understanding anything about the world they inhabit, have still managed to come to the conclusion that Socialism is the answer to everything.
Just as “racist” is a term to shut you up about illegal immigrants materialising out of thin air in every corner of every little town
How about derogatory remarks made about English people north of the border? Does that get a special exemption?
There is something seriously wrong with people in Scotland who keep voting for this insidious SNP/Green Communist pincer movement. Wake up for gods sake. —–These people are proposing to not let you sell your house unless you rip out the gas central heating and get a heat pump at enormous expense. They want to criminalise what you say in your own living room and their “Named Person Scheme” wanted to appoint a government spy into your family life but was fortunately declared illegal by the Supreme Court. Look at all the shenanigans with Sturgeon and the missing money and painting her toenails at taxpayers expense. ——-Yet Boris eats a bit of cake and you get into a tizzy about it. —-Wake up before you end up cold and poor and if you dare to complain you will be committing hate crimes.
My Scottish Presbyterian minister great-grandfather would approve of this!
Just shows how far we haven’t come.
Next month I’m going to a quarterly lunch with some friends/ex-Colleagues. We call ourselves Old Gits (for obvious reasons). We communicate with each other on a WhatsApp group called funnily enough “Old Gits”. Presume that’s a double whammy hate crime. Can one commit a hate crime against oneself?