No10's warning over Humza's hate crime law. Downing Street rules out Bill amid ... trends now
Rishi Sunak last night branded the SNP’s new hate crime law a ‘chilling’ threat to freedom of speech.
The legislation – spearheaded by Humza Yousaf when he was Justice Secretary – is set to come into force next month.
Offences are considered aggravated if they involve prejudice on the basis of age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity or variation in sex characteristics.
The law creates new offences of ‘stirring up hatred’ – which previously applied only to race – and can be broken in private homes as well as in public, meaning that dinner party conversations could be criminalised.
Last night Downing Street attacked the legislation and ruled out any similar moves south of the Border.
It comes after Elon Musk, the US billionaire owner of social media platform X, yesterday made similar warnings about the law’s potential threat to free speech.
The SNP ’s controversial Hate Crime Bill comes into effect on April 1
A No 10 spokesman said: ‘I wouldn’t want to comment or speculate about individual cases, but the Prime Minister himself believes in free speech. For example, he has been very clear on what the definition of a woman is, and that biological sex matters, and he doesn’t believe that that should be controversial.
‘For the Government’s part, we would never and are not introducing any similar kind of legislation here in England. And we’d be very aware of the potential for chilling effects on free speech.’
At the time the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Bill was passed in 2021, Mr Yousaf claimed that stating a belief would not cross the threshold for criminal behaviour – but critics fear the law will lead to a surge in workload for an already overstretched police force.
Police chiefs vowed to investigate ‘every report’ of a hate crime – just days after effectively writing off probes into 24,000 minor offences a year as part of a more ‘proportionate response’.
Officers will be forced to look into complaints even if they are unlikely to meet the criteria for being criminal offences. They will be recorded as non-crime hate incidents, which Police Scotland noted on more than 5,500 occasions in less than a year.
Last night Tony Lenehan, KC, president of the Faculty of Advocates’ Criminal Bar Association, said the public knowing what is and what is not a crime is a ‘vital part of any modern democracy’.
He told BBC Scotland: ‘Where the new statute is woven with threads of subjectivity, the broadcasters, after-dinner speakers, comedians, debaters and dramatists must trust to luck that they don’t end up being prosecuted under it.’ Mr Lenehan said most of the behaviour tackled by the hate crime legislation ‘would already be a crime’ as public order offences.
Murray Blackburn Mackenzie, an Edinburgh-based policy analysis group, has been trying to seek assurances about the position of women’s rights campaigners who are critical of gender policy.
It said: ‘There has been no attempt over the past three years to involve those who had concerns about the Act, to allay worries about how the police would handle complaints.’
Despite gaining Royal Assent in April 2021, the legislation has not
