The Revenge of Mattie Ross Part 1
Update 340 Hate Crime Special
I am swamped again, dear readers, so this will be another three parter!!
Firstly, thanks to two wonderful readers for directing me to several of the pieces that will be featured in these three parts.
I thought it was about time we had a girl for our Leading Female Season so No 16 is Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie Ross in True Grit ( 2010 re-make).
Fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross's father is murdered by hired hand Tom Chaney. Sent to collect her father's body, Mattie finds out that Chaney has likely fled with "Lucky" Ned Pepper and his gang into Indian Territory, where the local sheriff has no authority. She then inquires about hiring Marshall Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges). Cogburn initially rebuffs her offer, doubting both her grit and her wealth, but she raises the money.
Texas Ranger LaBoeuf ( Matt Damon) arrives in town, pursuing Chaney for the murder of a state senator. LaBoeuf and Cogburn set off alone but Mattie chases them and, in the scene below, her wonderful horse, Little Blackie fords a river and she catches them up.
“That is quite a horse!”
Kevin Lister
I am afraid that Kevin has lost his tribunal case. I previously reported on his case here:
https://dustymasterson.substack.com/p/the-teahouse-of-the-august-moon-part-8b7
I have printed off the judgment and will be reading it and don’t want to really comment further until I have done that. You can find the judgment here:
https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Lister-v-New-College-Swindon.pdf
Ben Chapman in GB News ('We've allowed Equality Act to usurp safeguarding our children!' Teacher fired over refusing to use trans pronouns hits out after losing case 28 March) reports:
A gender-critical teacher sacked for refusing to use a student’s preferred pronouns has lamented the decision in a GB News interview.
Speaking to Bev Turner and Ben Leo, Kevin Lister said the Equality Act has resulted in children’s safeguarding being ‘usurped’.
He said the tribunal’s ruling left him ‘devastated’ after a statement said that he had ‘harassed and discriminated’ a student.
But the 60-year-old told GB News he has no regrets for ‘putting safeguarding first’ and refusing to refer to the student as their preferred pronouns.
You can find the full article here:
Scottish Hate Crime Act
As everyone knows this awful Act comes into force, most appropriately, on April Fool’s Day. I did a bit of an analysis after the endpiece here:
https://dustymasterson.substack.com/p/when-the-day-of-battle-is-endedpart
My wife and I will be attending Let Women Speak in Edinburgh on 06 April. I am pleased to see that Murdo Fraser MSP is already launching a counter attack.
Owen Evans in Epoch Times ( Tory MSP Threatens Police With Legal Action Over ‘Hate’ Record 25 March) reports:
The Free Speech Union warned many more ‘Orwellian’ non-crime hate incidents will be recorded against ‘Scots who dare to dissent from fashionable orthodoxy.’
A Scottish Conservative politician is considering legal action against the police after he discovered a post he made criticising the government’s transgender policy was logged as a non-crime hate incident.
Murdo Fraser, who is being supported by the Free Speech Union, claimed the recording is “unlawful” and accused police of breaching the Data Protection Act, the Human Rights Act, and the Equality Act.
Police Scotland defended the use of non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs) to The Epoch Times, saying that “seemingly low-level or minor events can have a significant impact on someone who may already be very vulnerable.”
On Nov. 18, 2023, Mr. Fraser posted a link on social media platform X to a Scotsman article by columnist Susan Dalgety about the Scottish Government’s “Non-Binary Equality Plan,” which had been published earlier that week.
Non-Crime Hate Incidents
Mr. Fraser wrote that “choosing to identify as ‘non-binary’ is as valid as choosing to identify as a cat. I’m not sure governments should be spending time on action plans for either.”
Dusty - hear, hear!!
A trans activist then reported his post to Police Scotland claiming that it constituted hatred against non-binary or transgender people.
Despite no crime being committed, a “hate incident (non-crime incident)” was recorded against Mr. Fraser without his knowledge.
British police have been encouraging the public to report NCHIs, described as “any non-crime incident which is perceived by the victim or any other person to be motivated by hostility or prejudice,” on official hate crime sites.
Scottish police say they take reports of these incidents “very seriously.” As a matter of policy, Police Scotland record all NCHIs.
Edinburgh-based policy analysis collective Murray Blackburn Mackenzie said that because Scotland’s NCHI policy is “based on the complainant’s perception, complainants are viewed as ‘victims’, irrespective of any evidence of a criminal offence.”
‘Stirring Up of Hatred Offences’
The legal threat emerges as the country is preparing to implement its contentious hate crime laws, scheduled to come into effect on April 1.
The Scottish National Party’s Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act, introduced by First Minister Humza Yousaf when he was justice secretary, was approved by the Scottish Parliament in 2021 and has received Royal Ascent. It had been dormant until now.
The law creates new a crime of “stirring up of hatred offences” for protected characteristics, including “age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, and transgender identity.”
In his letter to Police Scotland’s Professional Standards Department, Mr. Fraser said that the force’s current policy on the recording of NCHIs is not compliant with UK law, and its action in recording a “hate incident” connected to him is “unlawful.”
He said that he wants Police Scotland to change its guidance for the reporting and recording of hate crimes to align it with UK and international human rights law, and permanently delete its record of the hate incident (non-crime incident) recorded against him.
“I have assiduously pursued all available means of resolving this matter and now reserve all rights to seek the deletion of the hate incident (non-crime incident) and amendment of the unlawful policy by way of judicial review and/or by way of a civil claim in the sheriff court as applicable,” he said.
Reacting to the news on X, the author of the column that Mr. Fraser posted, Susan Dalgety, said she was checking if the police also held information on her.
“Completing a subject access request now, though can’t quite believe I am having to do this,” she wrote.
A Police Scotland spokeswoman confirmed to The Epoch Times by email that the incident was recorded as a non-crime hate incident and that it had received a complaint relating to this matter which had been passed to the Professional Standards Department for assessment.
She said that “hate incidents are not recorded against alleged perpetrators.”
“Recording is victim-focused and the process has been part of policing for many years. It helps us monitor tensions within communities enabling appropriate police responses and helps to build community confidence. Seemingly low-level or minor events can have a significant impact on someone who may already be very vulnerable,” she added.
The Free Speech Union wrote that what happened to Mr. Fraser “isn’t some one-off aberration, but constitutes part of a wider trend towards the criminalisation of speech based on subjective criteria that Scotland’s new hate crime law will only intensify.”
“From April Fool’s Day onwards, we fear we’ll see many more of these Orwellian ‘hate incident (non-crime incidents)’ getting recorded against Scots who dare to dissent from fashionable orthodoxy,” the union added.
Harry Miller
In his letter, Mr. Fraser mentioned that in 2021, a top court ruled that the College of Policing guidance on recording NCHIs violated former police officer Harry Miller’s freedom of expression as set out in Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights.
Mr. Miller had brought a judicial review against the professional body for the police in England and Wales, the College of Policing, and Humberside Police after an officer visited him at work to “check his thinking” over reposting a gender-critical limerick on Twitter.
In England and Wales, police can now only record NCHIs when absolutely necessary.
Dusty - the whole thing is a nonsense and aimed at curbing free speech - get rid of it!
The Epoch Times contacted the Scottish Government for comment.
I am very grateful to Andrew Doyle and Malcolm Clarke for allowing me to reproduce the whole of their marvellous pieces about the Act. These pieces are so good I don’t think there is any need for me to comment on them. Enjoy! Well…maybe not enjoy!
I recommend both of their wonderful substacks.
Why are the police investigating “non-crime”?
This authoritarian abuse of state power has to stop.
ANDREW DOYLE
MAR 26, 2024
What business do our police forces have in investigating “non-crime”? Is this not the precise opposite of their purpose? It would be the equivalent of a doctor who limits his attention to the vigorous and the healthy.
And yet this is precisely how our law enforcement officers are spending much of their valuable time. Between 2014 and 2019, almost 120,000 “non-crime hate incidents” were recorded by forces in England and Wales. Estimates now suggest that since then the figure will have risen to well over a quarter of a million.
In Scotland, the situation is arguably about to get even worse with the introduction of the SNP’s new hate crime law. Police Scotland is already stretched to the limit, which is why it recently announced its “proportional response” strategy; that is to say, the police will no longer investigate vandalism or theft if the crimes are unlikely to be solved. And yet First Minister Humza Yousaf believes that “non-crime” ought to be a priority. Here’s what he had to say this week in an interview with STV:
It has apparently escaped Yousaf’s attention that the rate of “non-crime” has escalated in recent years because there is no evidential threshold required for such incidents. They are recorded by police even when there is no evidence of “hatred” other than the “perception of the victim”. And these numbers become wildly inflated the more that the police appeal to the public to report them. Who would have thought that people with a grudge might exploit such a system?
Yousaf’s comments have come about because a Scottish Conservative MSP, Murdo Fraser, has now discovered that the force recorded a “non-crime hate incident” against his name. This was a result of criticism he had posted online of the SNP’s policies on gender self-identification:
“Choosing to identify as ‘non-binary’ is as valid as choosing to identify as a cat. I’m not sure Governments should be spending time on action plans for either.”
And Fraser is not the only politician who has fallen foul of the non-law in recent times. In 2017, the then Home Secretary Amber Rudd had a non-crime hate incident recorded against her because she referred to “migrant workers” in a speech at the Tory party conference. Someone took offence and contacted the police. That was all it took.
And Rachel Maclean, the MP for Redditch and deputy chair of the Conservative Party, was in the news in December for reposting a tweet which referred to Green Party candidate Melissa Poulton as “a man who wears a wig and calls himself a proud lesbian”. This happened to be a statement of fact, but this didn’t stop the West Mercia Police adding the dreaded mark against her name.
So where has all this come from? In 2014, the College of Policing, the quango responsible for training police forces in the UK, introduced “non-crime hate incidents”. They had no mandate from the government; it was more a case that activists who believe in the need to control the language of the public had become predominant, as they have in so many public institutions. The idea would be that even if someone hadn’t committed a crime, signs of “hate” needed to be monitored in case these sentiments developed into criminal activity in the future.
Philip K. Dick once described this kind of thing as “pre-crime”. He thought he was writing dystopian science fiction, but in actuality he was predicting the state of the UK in the early twenty-first century.
“Non-crime hate incidents” work in the following way. If someone feels insulted or offended, and perceives that the slight is motivated by hate, they can contact the police and the person in question will have a “hate incident” recorded against them. They usually won’t be informed, and the only way to find out is to submit a subject access request. “Hate” is defined as an offence against one of the protected characteristics. You can find them listed on the websites of the Crown Prosecution Service and the College of Policing: race, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity and disability. The SNP has added a sixth category in its new hate crime legislation – “variations in sex characteristics” – which is apparently related to those described as “intersex”.
Those familiar with UK law will have noticed that this list is a riff on the protected characteristics of the Equality Act 2010. “Gender reassignment” has turned into “transgender identity”, and the category of “sex” has been removed entirely. In other words, the law enforcement agencies are using revised lists of their own making to better reflect their ideology. This explains why threats against women for standing up for single-sex spaces tend to be ignored by the police, while those accused of “misgendering” have been strong-armed into custody.
And although nobody has been actually arrested for “non-crime”, there can be serious implications. There are certain jobs, such as teaching, for which a Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) check is a prerequisite. Applicants for posts of this kind are likely to be eliminated from consideration if a non-crime hate incident is flagged. And in any case, the principles of a liberal democracy ought to be override such practices. It is deeply sinister and authoritarian to have the police recording lists of citizens who have committed wrongthink.
One wonders how many of us have been logged as “hateful” in this way? A man in Bedfordshire was slapped with a non-crime hate incident for whistling the theme tune from Bob the Builder at his neighbour, which for some reason was interpreted as racist. Other actions that have been recorded as hate incidents by police include: a disputed line call in a tennis match, a dog defecating on someone’s lawn, and a man saying that he was campaigning for Brexit.
Even children’s playground insults have been logged as non-crime hate incidents. The lawyer Sarah Phillimore, who has appeared on my show many times, was recorded as having committed a hateful act when she posted a satirical tweet which featured a picture of her puppy along with the caption “my dog will call me a Nazi for cheese”. As Phillimore has noted in relation to Yousaf’s recent comments on the subject:
“The recording of malicious and ideologically motivated complaints of ‘hate’ provide the police with zero useful operational information, even assuming they can ever get round to analysing them. This is about ‘Zersetzung’ - the Stasi technique of psychological degradation, to make us afraid, to make us our own jailers and our own censors. Cheaper that way than prison or bullets.”
Not only is this all a huge waste of police resources and taxpayers’ money, but it’s not even lawful. We know this thanks to the efforts of Harry Miller, a former constable who was contacted by Humberside Police in 2019 following a complaint by an offended party about a poem that he had shared on social media which was deemed to be transphobic. Harry, being an ex-cop, knew something was amiss. He asked the officer why the unnamed complainant was being described as a “victim” if no crime had been committed, and why was he being investigated at all. To which came the baleful response: “We need to check your thinking”.
Thankfully, Harry is a tenacious type who took the police to the high courts with the help of the Free Speech Union. In December 2021, the Court of Appeal ruled that “the recording of non-crime hate incidents is plainly an interference with freedom of expression”. Earlier that year, the Home Secretary Priti Patel had instructed the police to stop all such investigations. And in March 2023, Home Secretary Suella Braverman published new guidelines reminding police that the recording of non-crime cannot continue.
But in spite of these government decrees, and a high court ruling that has emphasised its illegality, the College of Policing has merely fudged the language of its guidance and carried on as before. And with its imminent hate crime law, the SNP are about to take this to a new level.
At some point this has got to stop. Surely it’s beyond the point now where the College of Policing ought to be abolished and replaced with a service that observes the law rather than the demands of activists? And surely the Scottish electorate will soon begin to wake up to the authoritarianism that is hard-wired into the DNA of its own government.
We are now firmly in the age of thoughtcrime anticipated by George Orwell. If those in charge do not understand the importance of liberty, the people will have to remind them, either through the ballot box or through civil disobedience. The alternative is too chilling to contemplate.
Scotland's Free Speech Monsters
The Hate Crime Act is the product of a second rate political class captured by the LGBTQ+ lobby and Scotland's dark history of bullying elites telling ordinary people what they can and can't say.
MALCOLM RICHARD CLARK
MAR 28, 2024
“We look to Scotland for all our ideas of civilisation.”- Voltaire
‘I believe this is the historical age and this the historical nation.’- David Hume
There was a time when young working class men were held up as heroes by the Scottish Establishment. When they were needed as cannon fodder. Or to save the bacon of idiot politicians who had appeased the Nazis and suddenly realised that was a mistake; as in this recruitment ad from 1938.
Roughtie toughtie young men have been an icon of Scotland since time immemorial. Now they are a problem. Or they are for the SNP who in the briefing for their new Hate Crime Act which becomes law on April Fool’s Day (for obvious reasons) tell us:
“We know that young men aged 18-30 are most likely to commit hate crime, particularly those from socially excluded communities who are heavily influenced by their peers.
“They may have deep-rooted feelings of being socially and economically disadvantaged, combined with ideas about white-male entitlement.”
Quite how young white men adopted “white male entitlement” in a country that’s 95.4% white and has a Muslim First Minister as well as a Hindu Prime Minister is unclear.
This tendentious information was provided as part of Police Scotland’s government approved launch of a campaign featuring the much-ridiculed Hate Monster who apparently stalks Scotland. It hides inside young men aged 18-30 ready at any moment to take them over.
Watch this tax-payer funded ad and see if a hate monster doesn’t take you over too.
The Hate Monster was lampooned so cruelly it probably had to report a hate crime. It even disappeared briefly from Police Scotland’s website. Perhaps for counselling. But he’s now back. Maybe he had an outburst and had to be sedated. Or talked down from his white male entitlement.
Talking of white males, in less than a week’s time this old white bloke might be arrested. On April Fool’s Day (did I mention that) the Hate Crime Act becomes law and in anxious phone calls with friends I’ve been comparing what strategies to adopt. Have I got a lawyer on call, one asks. Should I film my arrest?
Colleagues tell tales of having seen leaked messages from trans activists with lists of people, me included, whom they intend to mass report. It’s tempting to scoff but the uncertainty has eaten away at even the bravest gender critical person. Some have kids and careers they have to protect. The problem is that even if they turn over a new leaf and refrain from the sort of overt criticism of trans extremists like India Willoughby which any sane person enjoys….there is no guarantee they will be left in peace.
That’s because under the Hate Crime Act you don’t have to be a purported victim to report a hate crime. You only have to claim to have witnessed one. You can also report a hate crime anonymously. And believe it or not the police have insisted they will investigate every report which rather suggests no matter how ridiculous the claim it will still take up the time of both cops and the person accused. If only the police took the same approach to burglary and theft, incidents of which Police Scotland have recently stated they will only investigate where there is clear evidence such as CCTV.
At first many of us who are likely to be targetted consoled ourselves with the belief that the vast majority of cases would never proceed to the courts. It’s becoming increasingly obvious though that a police investigation will itself be a form of punishment. A few days ago Stuart Campbell, who runs the website Wings Over Scotland, posted a detailed description of what happened to him when he was reported by someone with a grievance. The case never went to court but he ended up significantly out of pocket and was essentially prevented from expressing himself for weeks.
“In 2017, under a very similar law, I was subjected to a malicious, ridiculous allegation of “harassment” by a journalist whose work we’d critiqued, and arrested. I was dragged off to a police station, thrown in a cell, detained for 15 hours, and then released just before midnight, 10 miles from home in a remote and unfamiliar location with no money and no mobile phone, and told to make my own way back.
I had no phone because all of my phones, along with all my tablets, all my laptops and all my desktop PCs, had been seized – for no justifiable reason, because all of the supposed “harassment” took place online, and tweets aren’t stored on your devices but on Twitter’s servers – when I was arrested and then taken away and impounded by the Metropolitan Police (because the complainer was based in London).”
Will that happen to me? Will the desk top I’m currently typing this post on be impounded? Will I find myself ten miles from home being soaked by April showers (which tend to fall horizontally in Glasgow). Who knows. Either way, whether or not the police decide to prosecute the mere claim that a hate crime was committed will be logged as a non-crime hate incident.
This ridiculous category of “non-crimes” has long been a scandal. A few days ago the MSP Murdo Fraser drew attention to the way the police misuse them when he threatened to sue Police Scotland for logging a hate incident after a member of the public reported one of his tweets.
The tweet from November commented on the Scottish government's proposed Non-Binary Equality Action Plan (sic).
"Choosing to identify as 'non-binary' is as valid as choosing to identify as a cat. I'm not sure governments should be spending time on action plans for either”, said Fraser rather brilliantly.
Murdo only realised this had been logged as a hate incident when a member of the public (presumably the same moron who reported him in the first place) wrote to the Scottish Parliament quoting it and suggesting this meant he had broken the code of conduct for MSPs. Luckily the allegation was treated with the contempt it deserved. But here’s the thing. Fraser wasn’t criticising an individual. He was criticising a government policy.
The fact that the police bothered to investigate and then log the incident suggests they find it diffiult to draw the line between political comment and so called hate crime. That inability shouldn’t surprise us. Everything about this Act is immersed in confusion and contradiction. Just a few days after SNP top brass reassured the public misgendering wouldn’t be considered a hate crime an SNP MSP by the name of Fulton MacGregor told Newsnight that it actually might be… “depending on the circumstances”.
Err…
MacGregor went on to admit that JK Rowling might be targetted by multiple hate crime complaints. If the biggest single taxpayer in Scotland is targetted will the police really investigate every single complaint? At what number do they give up? Or realise they are being played.
MacGregor went on to defend the new Act by claiming that such complaints about JK Rowling could be made now without it. Which only poses the obvious question, why bother passing a new law.
MacGregor had an answer to that. Hate crime, he claimed, is a major problem across Scotland and “wreaks havoc on communities and individuals”. This must be a tad disappointing if you are an SNP activist, given that the SNP has been in government for 17 years.
And yet as Stuart Campbell showed in his latest post which meticulously examines crime statistics there is not a single recorded case of a crime against a trans person in Scotland, motivated by them being trans. Indeed you have to go back to 2019 to find any crime against a trans victim and those are superficial (and not motivated by their trans identity). There has never been a murder of a trans person in Scotland. I’d point out the significantly larger number of crimes committed by trans people and their seriousness -ranging from kidnap and sexual abuse to rape - but that would be a hate crime. Obviously.
The lamentable performance of MacGregor underlines how unimpressive the SNP’s loyal backbenchers are. No wonder dumbos like this have been easy prey for the LGBTQ+ lobby. A Hate Crime law has been a key goal of this lot for years, primarily because they hoped it would silence or minimise criticism of their own aims and tactics. Passing a law on its own would not work though if the people who were to enforce it had not been brainwashed to accept the lobby’s own interpretations of both the law and the crimes it is supposed to be aimed at.
If you doubt whether such institutional capture of the cops was successful feast your eyes on this abomination.
These are graduates of the Scottish Police College in Fife in 2021 lining up in their…err…black shirty uniforms to pay homage to the Progress Flag. Stonewall Scotland has been embedded at the College for over a decade. They’re not the only activist group busily brainwashing the people to whom alleged Hate Crimes will be reported.
Last week it was reported that a training session for cops on hate crime led by TIE (Time for Inclusive Education) included an example of a female who “was prominent on social media” who argued there were just two sexes (how novel an idea). She was called Jo. Was this a dig at Joanna Cherry, Jo Phoenix or JK Rowling? Or all three. The fictional gender critical Jo just happened also to believe trans people should go to gas chambers. As gender critical people are wont to ….except they never do.
Even more shockingly, when TIE were accused of manufacturing this example they denied it was their material. It was Police Scotland, they said, who had come up with it. That’s how deep the subversion has run. Police Scotland now think maintaining that there are two sexes is akin to gassing people.
I’ve written here before about the capture of the cops. In England this was made possible by the creation of a centralised College of Policing. The College itself was a perfectly good idea and was designed in part as a response to concerns about racism, and sexism among young recruits. The Stephen Lawrence case had shown the need for a bigger, better-funded effort to combat these. Scotland had always had centralised police training and its capture followed the English model.
Stonewall lobbied hard for the College, which was set up in 2012. By then the organisation was embedded in dozens of police forces across both England and Scotland. In both colleges it began to work with senior cops to enact a root and branch reform of police training.
At the heart of its lobbying effort Stonewall wielded what was considered an incontrovertible argument. The charity published its first Gay British Crime Report in 2008. Many were to follow and soon bore the new title the Stonewall Hate Crime Report.
These were used to discipline and bully cops both north and south of the border. The Reports had the heaviest possible backing. Stonewall managed to get the then Home Secretary Jacquie Smith to write the first Report’s Introduction. In subsequent Reports a series of Chief Constables wrote the Introduction.
In 2013 the Report’s Foreword was penned by Alex Marshall, the Chief Executive of the College of Policing. That’s right: the place where ALL cops are trained in England and Wales. The extent of the sycophancy of senior police was underlined by Marshall pointing out in his first sentence that he was Stonewall Senior champion for 2013.
Bully for you darling.
In those days of course Stonewall was a gay organisation. But whisper it gently it was as a gay lobby group that it cheered on the surreal definitions of hate crime and hate incidents which are about to bedevil my life and that of so many other people who believe in two sexes. Be careful what you wish for. Be even more careful what you lobby for.
Take this definition from Stonewall’s 2013 Gay British Crime Report. Two years before it officially adopted trans ideology….Stonewall was already busy subverting free speech. Let this be a lesson to us all in gay organisations.
In 2012 Stonewall also submitted a Report to the Home Affairs Committee which included the recommendation that:
“The College of Policing should also look to work in collaboration with the Gay Police Association, and the lesbian, gay and bisexual staff networks of individual police forces where they exist, to support and raise the profile of gay police officers and police staff.”
These employee groups which ostensibly claim to be supportive forums for LGBT staff were in fact designed from the get go as internal amplifiers of Stonewall’s agenda. Here’s Police Scotland’s LGBTI Staff Group getting ready last year for a Pride march in Glasgow at which any lesbian who held up a placard saying ‘Lesbians Don’t Have Dicks’ would either be arrested or moved along. By…their colleagues. Or by them.
This degree of penetration by Stonewall and its allies means that the chances of the Hate Crime Act being applied fairly are minimal. The cops are captured. The Hate Crime Act to these activists in uniforms is just the means to an agreed and uncontested end.
Many observers are mystified as to how Scotland, of all countries, could have allowed a bunch of second rate blowhards and cops with pretensions to attempt to limit their free speech. They think of this nation as full of cantankerous, opinionated, and frankly rowdy people with a foul-mouthed love of scabrous insults. A country in which the word ‘cunt’ can be used semi-affectionately.
‘He’s a good cunt”, is a respectful comment.
Our elites though have a long tradition of trying to control what we can and can’t say. Often brutally. Just outside the town in Ayrshire where I grew up in (and from where I’m writing this post) is a cave where in the 1680s members of a Protestant rebel movement called the Covenanters took refuge from the authorities.
Thousands were hunted down by the likes of the Earl of Lauderdale and Viscount Dundee before being massacred with such ferocity the era became known as ‘The Killing Time’. This was in large part a state-sponsored attempt to stamp out free speech. The Covenanters, led by itinerant preachers, lambasted the official religious establishment, speaking ‘their truth’ in open air assemblies.
English history is no bed of roses- so to speak- but the instinctive belief in free speech is the root-stock of English culture in a way that it just isn’t in Scotland. And that has everything to do with the sort of religion those rebel Protestants were defending.
The irony is that the fundamentalists hid in the same cave, Cleeves Cove, where a century before the healer Bessie Dunlop came to talk to spirits. She was one of thousands of women targetted in another blood-soaked period of Scottish history, after the Reformation of the mid 16th Century. In 1576 she was put on trial for allegedly consorting with the devil. She said she’d conversed with a man who had died decades before and he’d imparted his healing knowledge to her. That was the sort of opinion or belief that could get you killed. And it did. Bessie was burned at the stake. Scotland murdered more alleged witches per capita than any other European nation.
The Scottish Enlightenment, the 18th Century flowering of intellectual and scientific genius, was in part driven by a passionate rejection of the country’s bloody and intolerant tradition of violent extremism. One last legal case proved the final straw, and heralded a new era.
On a bitterly cold evening in 1696 a 19 year old student was walking past the Tron church in Edinburgh. Turning to friends he remarked,
‘I wish right now I were in that place Ezra called hell, to warm myself there’. It was a joke. It turned out to be no laughing matter.
A few months later Thomas Aikenhead’s throw-away comment was referenced in his trial for blasphemy. Witnesses told how of he often ridiculed religion.
“The Holy Scriptures were stuffed with such madness, nonsense, and contradictions, that he admired the stupidity of the world in being so long deluded by them” said one witness.
Despite Thomas’s terrified and abject apologies Kirk leaders demanded the ultimate penalty. On the 8th of January 1697 he was marched at the head of a troop of armed soldiers to the edge of the city and hanged, the last person in Britain to be executed for blasphemy. The revulsion against the murder of young Thomas swept the country and the Kirk was never to recover fully its unquestioned authority. Its influence has though not ever been entirely exorcised. Nor the assumption that our establishment betters should dictate the behaviour and the opinions of ordinary citizens.
The modern Scottish state and the progenitors of its institutions were born out of the Reformation which in Scotland was among the most brutal and extreme in Europe.
For more than a century before Thomas was murdered the Church of Scotland dominated Scotland as thoroughly as any Islamic junta today. John Knox, its founder, embodied its unflinching conviction that individuals had to be bent to God’s will, by violence if necessary.
The Kirk kept Scotland in the tightest of grips, policing everything from what could be published and the school curriculum to what people could wear. Long after the English learned to ignore their vicars on a Sunday, the Kirk sent its elders round villages and towns to ensure everyone attended service. You could be dragged out of your house to do so. Once at church you’d almost certainly see sinners, such as the national poet Robert Burns, being assailed in front of the congregation for sins of the flesh. Or for making jokes or offensive comments. Free speech? I don’t think so.
We may like to imagine this totalitarian era has left no lasting legacy but can we be so sure? Is it an accident that Russia has yet again an authoritarian leader? Or that the French and riots continue to go together like baguette and brie? History isn’t destiny but it has a funny habit of repeating itself.
The Hate Crime Act is only partially explained by the shadow of John Knox haunting our collective Scottish psyche.
The Hate Crime Act is first and foremost the story of a second-rate political class desperate to distract attention from their inability to achieve their central mission. The SNP was set up to do just one thing…win Independence. It has been unable to do that or even win a consistent majority in opinion polls for it. Worse still the party’s leadership has no credible strategy for how it might ever achieve its defining goal in the future. That’s why it has no option but to hold fast- almost suicidally - to insanely ‘woke’ policies. Take them away and the party’s leadership, who are intellectually barely equipped to discuss the sort of issues that local Councils routinely consider, would finally have to acknowledge the enormous tartan elephant in the room.
It is no accident that it was immediately after the failure of the Scottish Independence Referendum in 2014, the same year by no sort of coincidence that Stonewall embraced trans rights, that the SNP sought out a slew of new policies that would allow it to look as if it was doing something useful even when it wasn’t. The new policies needed to appear progressive and radical even when they were not.
These policies were intended as a shop-window, offering a glimpse of the moral uplands awaiting Scots when Caledonia finally threw off her imaginary shackles. The problem is that the Hate Crime Act, like the Gender Recognition Reform Bill before it was drawn up with all the care and attention to detail you’d expect from a second-rate political class who’ve spent their entire lives avoiding hard questions. If you are adept at ignoring what currency the citizens of an independent Scotland might use, and how that might affect their mortgages, pensions and savings….it’s not exactly a stretch to ignore the threat to artistic expression in a Hate Crime Act.
As dangerous as the Act is to people like me, the repercussions for the SNP of associating itself with such an authoritarian misuse of the powers of the state may prove to be existential. The SNP promised us a better Scotland. Now it is in danger of giving renewed life to the worst aspects of Scottish history, the instincts of those in power to control and bully.
The leading figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, though fiercely patriotic Scots to a man or woman, viewed the Union with England as a bulwark against the worst excesses of their country’s past. England, they argued, acted as a counter-weight to the reactionary, authoritarian impulses that led to a 20 year old student being executed for expressing his opinions.
That’s why it is so astonishing that the Independence movement is now allowing itself to become associated with the most regressive aspects of Scotland’s turbulent past. The SNP has made a mistake of historic proportions in embracing a vision of Scotland as a place where its citizens can be harassed for thought-crimes and jailed for expressing opinions.
By its own actions it is unwittingly giving new life to the old Enlightenment argument that the Union can act as a defence against home grown Scottish bigotry. Only a political party that was brain dead could spend so much energy and political capital advancing laws that prove its opponents right. Or one that is so allergic to free speech it hasn’t been able to honestly debate its policies for years.
As for me and other gender critical Scots? I hope and suspect the Hate Crime Act will be the law that peaks a nation. Even if it isn’t we should refuse to be cowed.
I can’t help but think of young Thomas Aikenhead who made a joke that became evidence in a rigged trial.
We have the right today to say what we think, no matter how shocking to those in power, only because of the courage of people like Thomas. The dolts who imagine they are our betters can’t actually hang us nowadays, but they revel like their predecessors in their ability to fine us and jail us. The trans activists and their supporters, who are the pompous Kirk elders of our day, pumped up with a similar self-righteousness, will no doubt try to harass us, lie about us and try to silence us.
We owe it to young Thomas, frog-marched to the outskirts of Edinburgh to a gallows, to continue to speak what we believe to be the truth. And refuse to lie.
Meanwhile another excellent piece from Owen Evans.
Owen Evans In Epoch Times ( Scotland’s Hate Law Lacks Free Speech Safeguards: Complaints Chief 25 March) reports:
Katharina Kasper said it is unclear if there are any safeguards in the law to stop the process from becoming ’the actual punishment.’
Scotland’s hate crime law risks having a “chilling effect” on freedom of speech, the head of complaints at the country’s official police board has warned.
On Thursday, speaking at a Scottish Police Authority meeting, Katharina Kasper, the chairwoman of the Scottish Police Authority’s complaints and conduct committee, said that “credible voices across the judicial sector and human rights organisations” do not consider the legislation’s freedom of speech safeguards are sufficient.
The Scottish National Party’s bill, introduced by First Minister Humza Yousaf when he was justice secretary in 2021, is coming into force on April 1.
However, Ms. Kasper said that there are concerns that “by the time an allegation is made and an investigation starts, the process itself can become a punishment which may have a chilling effect on freedom of expression.”
“A lot of people will think that ‘actually I don’t want my name being recorded and I don’t want to be investigated, I’d rather not express an opinion which I perfectly legitimately can express,'” she said.
Hate Crime Law
The controversial new hate crime law, described as “dangerous” by free speech activists and MPs, is set to come into effect next month.
The law creates a new crime of “stirring up of hatred offences” for protected characteristics, including “age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, and transgender identity.”
The act has been described as “dangerous,” and that it could see people prosecuted in their homes, by a range of free speech groups and Scottish Conservative MPs.
Despite being inactive, Police Scotland has been readying itself to implement the act by extensive hate crime training.
Authorities also staged a mock trial to highlight racially aggravated hate crimes. Police have also set up designated “Hate Crime Third Party Reporting Centres” which include housing associations, victim support offices, voluntary groups, and private businesses such as fish farms, caravan parks, and even a sex shop in Glasgow.
Training
In response, a spokeswoman for Scottish Police told The Epoch Times by email that Chief Constable Jo Farrell was “very clear” during her update to the Scottish Police Authority Board that “officers will apply the law in a measured way, using discretion and common sense.”
She also provided a transcript of what Ms. Farrell said at the Scottish Police Authority meeting.
“We’re a rights-based organisation and our officers balance human rights against individual laws every single day, and this new hate crime act is no different. In fact it contains a specific reference to the protections people have around freedom of expression,” said Ms. Farrell.
She claimed that what “the legislation says and the training reinforces is that somebody’s view, while you might not like it or agree with it, does not become a criminal offence.”
“Police Scotland is used to enforcing new legislation, supporting our officers, providing them with the training and operational guidance they need to apply the law in a measured way using their discretion and common sense,” she added.
She said that “our training reflects all aspects of the act and has reminded officers of our human rights obligations,” and that “we have always taken hate crime seriously and are committed to investigating complaints, and we will continue to do so.”
“Hate crime is utterly deplorable, can cause deep psychological harm, and victims are often already vulnerable,” she added.
The Scottish Government did not want to comment.
It has claimed before that “there are protections in the new act for individuals’ rights in respect to freedom of expression for the new stirring up hatred offences,” and that hate crime is “behaviour that is both criminal and rooted in prejudice and can be verbal, physical, online, or face-to-face.”
As regular readers will know, I don’t think we should have such a thing as hate crime on the statute book. It is a method for government to suppress free speech. In terms of us in the Terf Resistance, it gifts trans rights activists with methods of harassing us by making false claims and allegations. Even if an allegation does not result in a conviction, as we know ‘the process is the punishment’. The Scottish Act, which is to be brought into force on 01 April, looks very worrying indeed. I would hope that there may be challenges to the legislation itself as to whether it is compatible with the Human Rights Act 1998. It seems to me that this would be a challenge based around the legislation being incompatible with Article 9 of the Human Rights Act ( freedom of thought , conscience and religion) and Article 10 (freedom of expression). This would be a high court challenge. This is also in the context of so called ‘gender critical beliefs’ being recognised as a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010 (Maya Forstater v CGD). I think we need to get this junk Act to the Supreme Court and hopefully halt all prosecutions in the meantime.
Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC)
Some good news from Kellie-Jay Keen in case you missed it. As most if not all of you will know Kellie-Jay has also lodged a defamation action against John Pesutto of the Liberal Party and this must surely back him into even more of a corner! Moira Deeming MP, who was also at the Melbourne Let Women Speak rally, is also taking action against him.
Endpiece
Once the gender wars are won, I think Kellie-Jay can pursue a career in comedy - this had me on the floor 🤣
Really interesting pieces, thanks Dusty. In particular, this from Malcolm Clark…” The leading figures of the Scottish Enlightenment viewed the Union as a bulwark against the excesses of their country’s past”. That was certainly true when Sunak stopped Self ID in Scotland but it won’t be true for much longer. In fact, are we going to see a revival of Self ID alongside it’s English equivalent under Labour, as well as equivalent hate speech laws here?
I hope Kevin Lister appeals.
Are you going to wear your Thought Criminal T shirt in Edinburgh? Advertising the fact that you are breaking the law in your head, may not be a good look in front of the Stasi. 😄