If the Scottish Government is to be believed, a roving band of bigoted individuals is attacking its citizens. In an attempt to deprogram the hate-filled hoi polloi from their rabid bigotry, the Hate Monster has been let loose. In an 80-second video, a character eerily reminiscent of Captain Caveman grows larger, fuelled by hate: ‘When ye feel angry; he’ll be there, feeding aff they emotions. Getting bigger and bigger, till he’s weighing ye doon.’ Since this online periodical’s editor is Scottish, I made sure to quote the proper vernacular to avoid committing a hate crime. [Och aye! Very wise! – Ed.]

Scotland’s Hate Crime and Public Order Act went into effect on 1 April. It was created to consolidate existing hate crime legislation and safeguard minorities who were thought to be particularly vulnerable. In 2020, after the George Floyd murder, then-Scottish Justice Secretary Humza Yousaf stated that ‘We cannot, and will not, tolerate hate crime, prejudice or discrimination of any kind.’ This came just a couple of months after he introduced the Hate Crime Bill in the Scottish Parliament. More recently, the First Minister has called for a ‘zero-tolerance approach to hatred.’ In addition to a long list of protected characteristics, including age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, and transgender identity, the Act establishes a new offence of ‘stirring up hatred’.

According to Police Scotland, a hate crime is defined as ‘Any crime which is perceived by the victim or any other person as being motivated (wholly or partly) by malice or ill will towards a social group.’ Put another way, it is a perception-based crime: the alleged victim’s—or witnesses’—subjective assessment alone is sufficient to classify an incident as a hate crime, without the need for any additional evidence. 

The Act’s defenders contend that this is an incorrect interpretation of the law. They argue that it is necessary for a ‘reasonable person’ to agree that an incident is threatening or abusive enough to constitute a hate crime. But there were already laws pertaining to death threats and every liberal democracy is based on laws that protect people from physical harm. So what of abuse? Words are not violence. This law conflates physical and verbal abuse. When someone verbally attacks you, the worst you will suffer is a bruised ego. It does not put a restriction on your freedom. 

And what of the effects on the alleged transgressors? You might be recorded as having participated in a non-crime hate incident (NCHI), even if you have not broken the law. If this occurs, you are unlikely to be informed, but it could become apparent when your employer conducts a disclosure check on you. Although NCHIs were not introduced as part of the new Hate Crime Act, it is a reasonable suspicion that more of them will be recorded now. The Court of Appeal (England and Wales) declared in 2021 that the recording of NCHIs as it had been done until then was unlawful. Despite this, police in England and Wales persisted, issuing 6,489 of them between June and November of last year, many of which involved ‘petty rows’. The Scottish police are merely doing the same.

It appears that elite paranoia about the general population is the motivation behind the Hate Crime Act. Hundreds of sites have been made available by Police Scotland for the public to report hate crimes, which range from a Glaswegian sex shop to a mushroom farm in North Berwick. You can visit one of these snitching centres located across the length and breadth of the nation and submit an anonymous report about someone. What could possibly go wrong?

If Harold Wilson’s oft-quoted observation that ‘a week is a long time in politics’ is correct, then the Hate Crime Act’s first one has been an unmitigated disaster. In the seven days since the Act’s enactment, Police Scotland logged over 6,000 reports. The police are wasting valuable resources on overtime due to the unceasing influx of incidents, costing hundreds of thousands of pounds, while actual crimes like burglary remain unsolved. 

Perhaps the worst aspect of the Act is that the dwelling defence has been removed, so people now face the possibility of prosecution for remarks they make while at home. Fines and jail terms of up to seven years are among the available forms of punishment.

And the Act is a hostage to the law of unintended consequences. As a senior Scottish police officer said, people might ‘use the legislation to score points against people who sit on the other side of a particularly controversial debate’. Thus, police might be forced to adjudicate between warring parties seeking revenge.

Meanwhile, Thomas Ross KC suggested that football fans might report rival supporters using the Act. Given the fierce rivalry and sectarian history of Old Firm football, this could prove a real headache for the police. Indeed, a number of reports regarding hate crimes were made after a match on 7 April according to The Times, including from people who overheard Rangers fans’ singing on the TV and radio, though the precise figure has not been verified. 

Like all laws that aim to outlaw offence, this one appears to have been thrown together on the fly. The best example of the ad hoc nature of the Act was provided by Siobhan Brown, the Minister for Victims and Community Safety, who stated that individuals may be subject to investigation if they misgender someone. J.K. Rowling chose to test the new law on April Fool’s Day, which, ironically, was also the day the Act went into effect. The gender critical feminist posted on Twitter/X about a number of men convicted of sex crimes now identifying as women. She said, ‘If what I’ve written here qualifies as an offence under the terms of the new act, I look forward to being arrested when I return to the birthplace of the Scottish Enlightenment.’

Thankfully, the police declared that the Harry Potter author’s tweets were not criminal. Additionally, they ignored reports against Humza Yousaf, who became a target for his now-infamous speech in 2020 in which he effectively criticised Scotland for being too white. Naturally, this has led to accusations that the police are selectively enforcing the new law. Take the Scottish Conservative MSP Murdo Fraser, who had an NCHI recorded against him for tweeting that identifying as non-binary was like identifying as a cat. Fraser now intends to challenge this in court. 

I write a lot about culture, so let me share a humorous example that encapsulates our submission to political correctness. Scot Squad was a Scottish mockumentary series about a fictional police force, and one episode was incredibly prescient. In it, the chief repeatedly digs himself into a bigger hole in an effort to make up for a relatively trivial comment. Feeling he is always offending someone, his long apology never ends. 

A recent poll indicates that 45% of Scots support the repeal of the law, while 21% support it. This is a heartening indication that the spirit of liberty in Scotland is not dead yet. The more people learn about it, the more resistance they seem to be putting up. We owe a debt of gratitude to J.K. Rowling for making the general public aware of the ridiculousness of this law. Ironically, it took a woman with a big set of balls to show up this illiberal legislation.

Further reading

From Satan to the Hate Monster, by Emma Park

Faith Watch, March 2024, by Daniel James Sharp

The return of blasphemy in Ireland, by Noel Yaxley

The post Is the spirit of liberty dead in Scotland? appeared first on The Freethinker.

On 26 October 2018, Ireland voted to remove the archaic criminal law of blasphemy from its constitution. Almost one million people (64.85 per cent of participants) voted, in what Taoiseach Leo Varadkar called a ‘quiet revolution’, to remove the word ‘blasphemous’ from article 40.6.1.i of the Constitution. This had previously stated that ‘the publication or utterance of blasphemous, seditious, or indecent matter is an offence which shall be punishable in accordance with law.’

The bill to remove blasphemy was signed into law by the president later that year. However, just three years later, the Irish government are introducing a new, even more authoritarian bill that will severely limit free speech, and has the potential to criminalise modern blasphemers. Barring amendment or rejection, this bill is set to become enshrined in Irish law.

Currently being debated in the Seanad, the upper house of the Irish parliament, the Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill 2022 would update and expand Ireland’s hate speech laws to include incitement to violence or hatred against persons or groups on the basis of protected characteristics, including religion, race, disability and gender. 

The bill contains many provisions that will make the average liberal or civil libertarian’s blood run cold. Under this bill, existing crimes such as assault and vandalism could lead to longer prison sentences if hatred is found to be the motive. According to Section 7, the mere possession of material that the state deems ‘hateful’ could result in citizens being sent to prison for up to five years if their actions are held to be ‘likely to incite violence or hatred’ against a person with protected characteristics. Should the bill it find its way onto the statute books, then, despite the government’s insistence that it includes a provision to ‘protect genuine freedom of expression’, there is little doubt that Ireland would become the ignominious holder of one of the most comprehensive ‘hate speech’ laws, if not the most totalitarian, in Western Europe. 

In April, the bill passed through the Dáil (Ireland’s equivalent of the House of Commons) relatively unscathed. Only 14 of the 160 Dáil members voted against the proposed amendments. Yet its provisions are comprehensive and authoritarian.

The Justice Minister Helen McEntee, who was responsible for the bill, argued that it was necessary in order to discourage the targeting of those with protected characteristics. Her comments were echoed by Pauline O’Reilly, a senator of the Green Party, who told the Seanad that restrictions on free speech were necessary to protect vulnerable people from ‘such deep discomfort that they cannot live in peace’. The senator is also reported as saying, using highly emotive language, that ‘the dirty, filthy underbelly of hatred in Irish society’ necessitates ‘the restriction of freedom’.

On the face of it, these proposals may sound like a good idea. Few would oppose laws that protect the rights of individuals, especially if the individual belongs to a persecuted or marginalised group. No ordinary, sensible person would tolerate despicable acts such as racist or misogynistic violence. 

Except that words are not violence. Verbal abuse is not the same as physical abuse. According to those who support hate speech legislation, living in fear of being ‘attacked verbally’ is a restriction on one’s freedom. A rhetorical question commonly deployed by opponents of free speech in this debate is, ‘why is it acceptable to protect freedom of speech for everyone when doing so harms the right of some people, in particular, those with protected characteristics, to live in peace?’ The question is what conclusion should follow from this. Those who support the severe limitations on free speech proposed by the bill would say that it is justified by its alleged ability to protect vulnerable people’s right to ‘live in peace’. But the alternative conclusion would be that everyone has to accept a certain amount of rough-and-tumble, and that no one’s ideas are above criticism. Sometimes, words can even act as a bulwark against physical violence – against which every liberal democracy has numerous laws to protect people.

Clarification is essential when it comes to the application of laws, especially those relating to civil liberties. But tyranny likes grey areas. The bill’s current definition of hatred (clause 2(1)) is vague and tautological:

‘“Hatred” means hatred against a person or a group of persons in the State or elsewhere on account of their protected characteristics or any one of those characteristics.’

This non-definition – ‘“hatred” means hatred against’ – led Thomas Pringle, the Independent TD (MP) for Donegal, to criticise the bill. He noted in a debate in the Select Committee on Justice that one ‘remarkable’ feature of the bill was that ‘hate is not defined in it’. Fundamentally, it is difficult to see how ‘hatred’ or ‘hate speech’, where it does not cross the line into existing criminal offences, such as harassment, libel, death threats or incitement to violence, could really mean anything more than ‘offensiveness’. But whatever the Merseyside police or hardline progressives might think, the idea that being offensive might be worthy of criminalisation is well beyond the current laws of either England or Ireland, and would be an extraordinarily illiberal step. 

Failure to define a crime can potentially lead to anyone being found guilty. When such vague definitions serve as the basis for a conviction, courts often have to base their sentence not only on a person’s actions but also on their beliefs. 

Consider the idea brought forward in the UK by Stella Creasy to make misogyny a ‘hate crime’. For several years the Labour MP has sought to make being motivated by misogyny an aggravating factor in criminal sentencing—with a potential prison sentence of up to seven years if it was determined that the crime was committed by someone with a hatred of women. We already have laws that deal with the most serious of misogynistic crimes, such as sexual assault and domestic abuse. Yet it is strange to think that a violent crime against a woman where the defendant was not motivated by misogyny should automatically be punished less severely than one where he or she was so motivated. If the harm done to the victim is the same in each case, there are real concerns with arguing that the law should categorise specific kinds of beliefs, when they motivate a crime, as making that crime liable to more severe punishment than it would be, had the defendant not been motivated by those kinds of beliefs.

McEntee and other supporters of the bill claim it is necessary to protect minority groups from actual verbal abuse. However a provision deeply buried in the bill indicates that its effects would reach much farther than that. Under Section 10 of the bill, the preparation or possession of material ‘likely to incite violence or hatred’ against people on account of their protected characteristics is a criminal offence punishable by up to two years’ imprisonment, when such preparation or possession is ‘with a view to the material being communicated to the public or a section of the public, whether by [the defendant] or another person’, and ‘with intent’ to incite hatred or violence or ‘being reckless’ as to whether they are incited.  In other words, if you privately possess material that might incite, not even violence, but the more nebulous response of hatred, and you are ‘reckless’ about whether hatred is incited if the material is shared publicly, then you could be guilty of a criminal offence – regardless of whether the material actually results in anyone’s being abused.

An even more chilling provision is then introduced (clause 10(3)): where the defendant is found to have possessed such material, and ‘it is reasonable to assume that the material was not intended for [his or her] personal use’, it is to be presumed ‘that the material [is] not intended for personal use’ unless he or she can prove otherwise. Thus, if the defendant is found to possess material likely to incite hatred, then, if it is reasonable to assume it was not for personal use, then they would be required to prove that it was, in order to escape conviction. In other words, this section, a little over 30 words long, effectively abolishes the presumption of innocence. The burden of proof will shift from the prosecutor to the defendant, on the grounds not of a proved intention, but of what it is ‘reasonable’ to assume the intention was.

As the ‘possession’ clause suggests, this bill, like other hate-speech laws around the world, such as Scotland’s infamous Hate Crime and Public Order Act, does not seek to protect vulnerable people from abstract definitions of hate, but rather is intended to limit what you can say or write. As such, it will curtail legitimate debate and pose a serious threat to free expression. Anything that prevents people from freely holding beliefs not sanctioned by the state, or viewed by the law as ‘dangerous’, is a threat to a free and liberal society. The idea of an informed citizenship is anathema to authoritarians.

As noble as they sound, laws against hate speech do not promote equality. They give victims an artificial sense of justice, but in reality, they do little to address the issues that have led to the supposed crime in the first place. If Irish lawmakers want to reduce prejudice against protected characteristics, they must abandon this bill and focus on education. Knowledge increases tolerance and acceptance. The irony is that this can only be achieved through the free exchange of ideas – which is exactly what this law is intended to prevent.

In The Gulag Archipelago (1973), Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn points out that people are unaware that they are complicit in acts of wrongdoing because dogmatic adherence to an ideology seems to justify their actions. In the case of Ireland, an ideology of identity that promises to protect minority groups from offence is allowing its adherents to hide their illiberal behaviour under the guise of moral righteousness. 

If Ireland is to remain a free country, it is essential that this bill be rejected in its entirety. A copy of Solzhenitsyn’s book should be left on the desk of every member of parliament. 

For a bibliography of our articles on free speech and free thought, see: Free Speech in the Freethinker.

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The post The return of blasphemy in Ireland appeared first on The Freethinker.

‘Without free speech no search for truth is possible; without free speech no discovery of truth is useful; without free speech progress is checked…Better a thousand-fold abuse of free speech than denial of free speech.’

So said Charles Bradlaugh, the radical politician, freethinker, and founder of the National Secular Society, in a speech at London’s Hall of Science over 150 years ago. His words are still profoundly relevant today, as societies and legislators grapple with the concept of free speech and where its limits should lie.

The human impulse for free thought and speech has, throughout history, clashed with religious sensibilities, and religious conservatives have consistently sought to stifle debate, criticism and mockery of their beliefs.

‘Cancel culture’ may seem like a modern phenomenon, but the ostracism faced by those who dare to speak against the prevailing orthodoxies of the day is nothing new. After being elected as MP for Northampton, Bradlaugh was prevented from taking his seat for many years on account of his well-known atheist views and broadsides against religion.

Religion’s political influence has resulted in blasphemy laws that criminalise insulting or showing contempt for ideas which are deemed sacred. Around 70 of the world’s 195 countries have blasphemy laws. Penalties for violating them can range from fines to imprisonment and death. 

Secularists have long led the charge to abolish such laws. Charles Bradlaugh first proposed a bill to abolish the UK’s blasphemy laws in 1889. He had himself narrowly escaped a blasphemy conviction in 1882 for his assistance in producing The Freethinker. Its editor, George William Foote, was less fortunate and found himself imprisoned in 1883 for twelve months with hard labour. Once released, Foote went on to succeed Bradlaugh as President of the National Secular Society.

Decades of subsequent campaigning culminated in the common law offences of blasphemy and blasphemous libel finally being abolished in England and Wales in 2008, and in Scotland in 2021. They remain on the statute books in Northern Ireland, albeit unused. But the threat of legal impediments to free speech about religion remains.

The Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006 created new offences of stirring up religious hatred. As originally drafted, the legislation would have replaced the scrapped blasphemy law with a wider-ranging prohibition that would cover not just Christianity but all religions.

A coalition of secularists and other free speech defenders had to win a hard-fought campaign to secure a vital freedom of expression clause. This ensures that nothing in the Act prohibits or restricts ‘discussion, criticism or expressions of antipathy, dislike, ridicule, insult, or abuse of particular religions, or the beliefs or practices of its adherents.’

Religious and non-religious groups alike united to successfully campaign for similar amendments in Scotland’s Hate Crime Act in 2021, which introduced several offences of ‘stirring up hatred’, including on the grounds of religion. The Act, which imposes stricter limitations on free speech about other contentious topics, such as transgender identity, has yet to be implemented. [See our discussion of this topic – Ed.]

The most restrictive speech laws remaining in the UK can be found in Northern Ireland, where ‘stirring up hatred’ offences criminalise ‘threatening, abusive or insulting’ forms of expression deemed ‘likely’ to stir up hatred or fear against religious groups, even if there is no intent to do so. The lack of a requirement for mens rea (intent), and of protections for free speech about religion, reveals a worrying disregard for freedom of expression.

Most people will accept there must be some limitations on speech – including both what they say in person and what they publish online. Laws against harassment, or incitement to commit crimes, as well as restrictions on libel or slanderous speech, are reasonable. But to put the emphasis of the law not on what has been said, but on the subjective feelings of a person who has been insulted or offended, is to ring the death knell for free speech. It is a dangerous road to go down.

Perhaps an even greater threat today comes from self-censorship: blasphemy codes which people feel obliged to impose on themselves not out of fear of breaking the law, but because of the threat of violence.

The declaration of a fatwa on Salman Rushdie, the murderous attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, and other outpourings of anger and violence from conservative Muslims with hurt feelings, has highlighted a clash between certain interpretations of Islam and free speech. And it has created an impulse to protect religious sensitivities to the detriment of free expression.

The incident in Batley last year, where a teacher was forced into hiding in fear of his life after using a cartoon of Mohammed to teach about freedom of expression, revealed an unwillingness on the part of the political and media establishment to stand up to fundamentalist demands.

The outcome of a subsequent investigation was that the teacher should not have shown the cartoon. The teacher was forced out of his job and his family from their home. This was a victory for the religious bullies and essentially a capitulation to the mob. Liberal principles were sacrificed for the sake of expediency and a quiet life. The problem is that accommodations made to religious fundamentalists will bring anything but a quiet life. They simply invite further demands and create an expectation that religious sensibilities will always be protected.

Meanwhile, a well-meaning attempt to tackle anti-Muslim prejudice by promoting a flawed definition of ‘Islamophobia’, as has been proposed by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims, risks further self-censorship.

The definition of Islamophobia proposed by the APPG is that it is ‘a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness’. This unhelpfully conflates criticism of Islamic practices with hatred of Muslims. It has the clear potential to chill freedom of expression, and in particular academic and journalistic freedom.

Attempts to police speech about Islam have been made at the international level. Between 1999 and 2010, a coalition of 57 Islamic nations known as the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) pushed ‘defamation of religion’ resolutions at the United Nations. Proponents argued that Muslims were facing growing intolerance and discrimination, which they described as ‘Islamophobia’. But human rights and secularist groups warned that the focus on protecting Islam rather than individuals was an attempt to impose a global blasphemy law.

The campaign by the Islamic nations faced opposition from western democracies, which argued that the ‘defamation of religion’ resolutions would violate the right to freedom of speech, thought, conscience and religion. Eventually the defamation approach was abandoned in favour of a resolution on ‘combating intolerance, negative stereotyping and stigmatisation of, and discrimination, incitement to violence, and violence against persons based on religion or belief.’

People have rights; ideas do not. The state should protect individuals, but not their beliefs. As the writer Kenan Malik argues, a distinction between people and ideas is essential both so that people may be treated equally and so that ideas may be challenged and changed.

The prevailing ‘culture of offence’, as some have called it, in which speech subjectively deemed ‘offensive’ or ‘hateful’ is considered beyond the pale, is toxic to democracy and harmful to the advancement of human rights.

The best way to foster social cohesion and preserve harmony between people of all religions and beliefs is to recognise that the freedom to question, criticise or mock religion is every bit essential as the freedom to practise religion. True freedom of religion or belief for all cannot be realised without guaranteeing freedom of expression.

Government and civil society need to send a clear message that in a liberal democracy there can be no right not to be offended. Being offended from time to time is the price we all pay for living in a free society. It is a price worth paying, because free speech means nothing without the right to offend.

Standing up for up for these liberal principles is crucial to the preservation of individual rights and freedoms. That is why promoting free speech as a positive value remains at the core of the National Secular Society’s work today.

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