Reports of the Demise of the Scottish Enlightenment May Have Been Premature

Well, it’s not even a month since I wrote that Scotland’s Hate Crime Act marked the death of the Scottish Enlightenment by alluding to the barbaric execution of Thomas Aikenhead for blasphemy in 1697, and it looks like rumours of its demise may have been premature.

This isn’t completely down to the machinations of the MSPs, despite a few heroic efforts on the Tory and Alba benches, but rather to the wonderful, stubborn and doughty people of Scotland.

Now the Scots have many faults. I can say this because I am one of them. We are too quick to anger, our character has been influenced both positively and negatively by living in the shadow of a more powerful nation to the south, the latter expressed by a degree of insecurity we are all born with. We have our issues with sectarianism and have enough Celtic blood (together with Norse, Angle and Briton) to hold the blood feud of tribalism close to our hearts. (That’s Hearts, not Hibs… you see: tribalism!)

However we have some virtues and one we’re also rightly proud of is that we are a free people. This last point is often glossed over with Mel Gibson in a wig memes. However, it has a serious point, which goes way back to the Declaration of Arbroath in 1320. For my Saxon readers this was a letter sent to the Pope from the lords temporal and spiritual of Scotland (speaking on behalf of the people) in response to the excommunication of their King, Robert Bruce. The document conveniently ignores the reason for the excommunication, Bruce’s murder in a church of John ‘The Red’ Comyn in 1306, and instead argues for his communion with the Church on the basis that he is the King of a free and ancient people.

The particular words that are branded on the backside of every Scottish baby (figuratively speaking) are:

It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.

[Now, the context of these words was independence from England, in particular, independence from both the English Crown and the See of Canterbury. However, like that other great document of the British People, Magna Carta, the meaning and significance of the declaration has changed over time.

‘Freedom’ changed after the emergence of the modern state of Great Britain in 1707, the union of two equals, the most successful union of two nations or peoples in the history of the world. Bereft of her seat of government, the intellectuals of Edinburgh threw themselves into philosophy, jurisprudence, science, engineering, medicine, art, architecture, economics and education. The light of the Enlightenment blazed brightly from this small northern city with a fervour that eclipsed others and which still shines to this day. ‘Freedom’ was no longer the freedom from England – union made that superfluous – it was freedom of thought, of speech, of ideas and conscience. This freedom fuelled the ideas that changed the world.

One of the things that non-Scots misread about us is to assume that our national pride comes from Mel Gibson, Robert Bruce and a thousand battles fought against Saxon, Norseman and, most often, each other. The main source of our pride actually comes from the huge contribution Scotland has made to the world, yes, it was spread by the Empire and the union with England, but it had to start somewhere. Arthur Herman’s somewhat tongue in cheek book How the Scots invented the Modern World makes this point. Modern economics, medicine, engineering and philosophy owe an awful lot to Scotland, never mind the inventions that poured out of Scots that have changed the world from the telephone to the television, tarmac, penicillin and even the Bank of England. Yes, we may get maudlin over a glass of the Water of Life about the heroes of old, but we are just as likely to get maudlin over our 1978 World Cup run. No, what Scots are most proud of, what is baked into our DNA is the huge contribution made to the modern world by a hairy, argumentative, somewhat aggressive, often resentful and frequently ginger haired people.

So it was this people whom Mrs Sturgeon and Mr. Yousaf fatally misread when they tried to do that very thing that the Scots despise more than anything else: take away their freedom.

No, not their freedom from mortgage, from responsibility, but the freedom to think, to ‘chew the fat’ (debate) and to ‘blether’ (talk). Mr. Yousaf decided to threaten this with spurious arguments around ‘harmful speech’. He wanted to sell our 400 year birthright to feather his own ego under the disingenuous claim that nasty words cause ‘harm’.

You would have thought that Yousaf would have known that ‘freedom’ is a thing very dear to the hearts of Scots. That we pride ourselves on being able to have robust debates in our pubs, no topic off piste, and to stagger home arm in arm at the end of the night, preferably past a chip shop for a deep fried haggis supper!

So it has been wonderful to see how the Scots reacted to the tyranny of the Hate Speech and Pubic Order Act 2021 (Scotland). Essentially with a colossal, national raspberry combined with the symbol of archer’s defiance borrowed from our English cousins: the two fingers!.

First off, the wonderful J.K. Rowling laid down the gauntlet – telling Police Scotland that they’d better come and arrest her as she wasn’t going to curtail her opinion. She followed this up by tweeting that if any woman was arrested for speaking her mind she would exactly mirror her words and share her fate. Before the Act had even gone live, she had trashed it, exposed it as unenforceable rubbish and, in the best Scots tradition stated those words dear to every British football fan: “Come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough!” The Police whimpered in response.

Then came the complaints against Humza himself. Doing a bit of ‘offence archaeology’, thousands of Scots swamped the ‘Grass Lines’ with complaints about Humza and his appalling speech in the Scottish Parliament where he appeared to have a problem with ‘Huwhite’ people. So many complaints were made that Police Scotland issued a script to the call handlers claiming that the speech was not racist. But wait – racism is in the eye of the beholder, it doesn’t matter what the Peelers think, it’s whether or not the victim feels they have been abused. Offence is in the power of the offended and they don’t get to decide for us what we find offensive or otherwise. Of course, this was greeted with glee at the clumsy hypocrisy as the hapless Yousaf was once again hoist with his own petard.

So overwhelmed were the ‘polis’ by the number of people reporting mates from the pub, dogs from defecating on their lawn, deliberately out of context statements by celebrities that they had to say they were no longer going to investigate a slew of actual crimes. Their laughably childish promise to “investigate every instance of hate reported” was proven to be impossible to meet, as they were warned by anyone with a modicum of common sense. In fact, this is a thread throughout this whole sorry incident. It should have been no surprise to the SNP that this law would be as much of a disaster in its implementation as it was in its drafting. They were warned, repeatedly, by the ‘hiheidyins’ (bosses) of the Scottish Legal system and by Police Scotland, and yet they went ahead anyway. The arrogance and hubris of Mr. Yousaf and his Government as they paddled their canoe towards the rapids, ignoring calls to stop has been remarkable, particularly as the rapids are of their own making.

Then this week the figures are in. The Free Speech Union tells us that since the law went live on April 1st, 0.6% of reports have been recorded as actual crimes: 9,374 incidents were reported since April 1st with only 616 recorded as possible hate crimes and merely 79 as ‘Non Crime Hate Incidents’. That last figure is interesting because police guidance states that any incidents not found to be crimes should be recorded as Non Crime Hate Incidents. So why are Police Scotland not doing this? Could it be that they have abandoned their own guidance a mere three weeks into the farce?

I don’t want to beat up Police Scotland too much here. They were given a hospital pass by the SNP Government, one which they never wanted and indeed objected to as deeply flawed and unenforceable in a nation that polices by consent. It seems extraordinary that the SNP Government seems to be at a loss to understand what that means, ‘policing by consent’, and the damage to the authority of the police through making hapless plod a laughing stock of the nation.

So I was wrong. It seems that it will take a lot more than ham-fisted, ideologically captured, arrogant in their certitude and deeply ignorant of the mood and culture of those they profess to govern to destroy the Scottish Enlightenment. No, that is in safe hands, the hands of the Scottish People who will fight “for freedom alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself”.

C.J. Strachan is the pseudonym of a concerned Scot who worked for 30 years as a Human Resources executive in some of the U.K.’s leading organisations. Subscribe to his Substack.