I can think of little to add to what Andrew Tettenborn of Spiked has written about The SNP’s war on free speech:
In 2017, the SNP government decided this had to change. It appointed Lord Bracadale, a far from libertarian Scottish appeal judge, to review the matter. His spectacularly hardline report was published a year later. Based on this report, Holyrood now proposes leaving racial-hatred law largely alone while introducing, in effect, three new offences.
First: a general crime of doing anything, or communicating any material, which is threatening or abusive and is intended or likely to engender hatred based on age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender or intersex identity. Second: a crime of merely possessing any such material, if you hold it with a view to communicating it – that is, in any way to anyone either in public or in private (such as showing a computer file to a friend over a dram). Third: criminal sanctions on anyone involved in the management of any organisation who fails to take steps to prevent any of the above. The penalty in all the above cases is up to seven years inside. And in addition to all this, the government proposes stiffer sentencing for hate crimes based on age.
There is so much wrong with these proposals. For one thing, the whole idea that hostility should aggravate an offence in relation to certain characteristics but not others needs reining in, not extending. To say that assaulting someone because he is old (and within the charmed circle of victim categories) deserves a heavier sentence than assaulting a teenager because he is the teacher’s pet (and therefore outside it) is discriminatory, grotesque and insulting. It is the hostility that matters, not whether the target falls within a group which has managed to persuade a government that it deserves victimhood status.
Read the whole thing.
From the OP
I get a whiff of a woeful misapprehension of discrimination law here, it’s far more Kafkaesque. Age discrimination is not about protecting the old or the young, or the middle-aged; it’s about conduct related to age as a concept and differences in treatment or conduct related to age (or even apparent age or perception of it); so this law could be much wider in application:
1. A pedo violates a child, conduct related to age.
2. A perv indecently assaults a mother, leaving her 8 year old daughter alone, conduct related to age towards the mother. Reverse it and it is still conduct related to age to the child.
3. Mug a 19-year old student but not a pensioner, conduct related to age.
So the trial descends into arguments not about the actus reus, but the mens rea of the defendant, and apart from the ill-intent to the victim, the absence or presence of age-related intention.
So in 2. if the perv assaults both, he’s got a consistency defence against the aggravated charge, and might get 2 shorter concurrent sentences rather than one longer one, and be out sooner, and the lawyers are happy.
The application of other law has similar imbalance.
Fall asleep at the wheel of your car, drift off the road, demolishing a road-sign and you’ll be charged as ‘without due care & attention’, fined a few quid and collect a few points on your license.
Fall asleep at the wheel of your car, drift off the road through a gap in the barrier and down an embankment onto a railway line, after which two trains crash into your wreckage and 10 people are killed – you get 7 years inside. (See Gary Hart/Selby case).
But the driving offence was the same, only the consequences were different. Is it justice when a penalty is based on incidental consequences, rather than the offence itself?
“based on age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender or intersex identity.”
Interesting that ‘being English’ is not on the list and they propose “leaving racial-hatred law largely alone.”
But then, it is a Scottish National Party proposal.
But it is the same with drunk driving, innit?
You are found DUI, you get a suspension of your driver’s license.
You kill someone while DUI, you go to jail.
At least, that is my understanding. If i am wrong, please let me know.
I often refer to them as the National Socialist Scottish Workers Party
Does that mean we can’t mention that Covid-19 might have escaped from a Biology lab somewhere in a big country to the west of Japan, south of Russia, and north of Vietnam, in case people not from that country start to feel hate to the rulers of that country? Who cares about evidence, so long as everyone feels happy?
Did they learn nothing from the Sectarian Offences Act débacle?
I’ve said it for years: I’d be far better disposed to the SNP’s principal raison d’etre if the Scotland they obviously have in their heads looked like somewhere I’d like to live. But it doesn’t. Not by a long chalk.
‘ Is it justice when a penalty is based on incidental consequences, rather than the offence itself?’
Yes. Justice has to serve both the perpetrator and victim.
Therefore there are sentence tariffs for each offence depending on circumstances and extent of damage to lives and property of others. Stealing a loaf of bread and stealing a diamond ring are both theft, but would you expect the penalty to be the same, would it be just to the person who stole the loaf to go to prison for the same period as the jewellery thief? If an individual punches another and blinds them, would it be justice for the victim if the assailant got the same sentence as someone who punched another resulting in a broken nose because the crime in both cases was assault?
If they treated shouting
or
as an offence in practice then they’d have had to arrest a non-trivial number of their own supporters during the indyref. However yelling either of these statements with some other nation substituted for England, and skin tone substituted for accent as the clue to which nation it should be, will have the natz leaders saying that the law already demands arrest, and demonstrating that belief in action. I know from Scots lawyer friends that the disproportion here in Scotland between the great effort put into pursuing crimes the PC care about and the whatever’s-left resources spent pursuing crimes the ordinary public care about is astonishing – and surprisingly well-concealed.
Scottish national socialism is marching on at a pace even I did not expect. There are plenty of remote islands where re-education camps for wrong thinkers could be sited, and I expect them to be used in the none too distant future.
Any party which introduces a system of licencing to own an air gun is not one which can be trusted with defending liberty, and the Scottish national socialists are doing their best to prove this point.
Also referred to as the Spiteful Nannying Party.
Some of it is attempted distraction from their own incompetence.
Every function of govt which they have centralised in Edinburgh and put Scotland in its title now performs worse than before or in comparison with other parts of these Isles, from health to transport there is nothing they can’t make a c*** of.