ONCE UPON A TIME, the Scottish Enlightenment gave the world reason, courage and plain speech. Now it gives the world The Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act a law so neurotically fragile it could file a police report against Voltaire. While England rubs its eyes and mutters “good grief,” Scotland doubles down. The Met Police have stopped investigating non-crime hate incidents – those surreal moments where officers act as grief counsellors for the easily offended. North of the border, though, we’re building an entire bureaucracy of emotion. We don’t enforce law anymore, we curate feelings. It’s as if Holyrood took 1984, underlined the scary bits, and said, “That’s the business plan.”
The hierarchy of the holy
When the Act passed in 2021, it forgot one rather important thing: women. The law protected religion, sexuality, disability, age and, of course, transgender identity. But not sex. So, by legislative magic, a man in a skirt became more protected than the woman he borrowed, or in Sam Brinton’s case, stole it from.
It was the first equality law in history to make women unequal by design, a triumph of ideology over biology. Now, after four years of ridicule, the Scottish Government has decided to fix the omission. You might think that’s progress. You’d be wrong. It’s like repainting the façade of a house whose foundations are cracking, it’s cosmetic, not courageous.
Adding women to the list just below cross-dressers
The think-tank Murray Blackburn Mackenzie, one of the last grown-ups left in Scottish public life, supports adding sex as an aggravator. But it warns against extending “stirring up hatred” to sex. The law’s supposed free-speech protections, it notes, are about as sturdy as a paper umbrella in a monsoon. It’s right. If the law can’t tell the difference between hatred and sarcasm, it isn’t protecting women, it’s infantilising them.
And if Holyrood’s idea of equality is “women can now be investigated too,” perhaps it’s time to switch off the lights and start again.
Macpherson’s children.
The madness began with good intentions. After the Macpherson Inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence, police were told to record every “racist incident,” crime or not, based purely on perception. It was a sincere attempt to confront the real and shameful history of racism in policing and to make sure victims were heard.
But what began as a tool for accountability slowly hardened into dogma. The principle belief perception was expanded far beyond its purpose. It became the new gospel of public life: hurt is harm, and perception is proof.
From that seed grew the modern “non-crime hate incident” the bureaucratic lovechild of anti-racism policy and therapy culture. Today, an off-colour tweet or clumsy remark can live indefinitely in a secret police database, even when no offence was committed and no charge ever made. Worse still, these records can surface years later in enhanced background checks, quietly shadowing people’s job applications and careers and you might never know a complaint has been recorded against you.
In England, this absurdity is finally dying
The Home Office’s 2023 Code of Practice tells police to record only if there’s a real risk of harm or escalation. Translation: “Get back to work.” Scotland, meanwhile, remains determined to defend its right to be ridiculous.
Police Scotland proudly holds around 7,000 such records including one for MSP Murdo Fraser, whose crime was joking about people identifying as cats. When he asked for it to be deleted, they refused. Once you’ve entered the Bureau of Hurt Feelings, you’re on the books for eternity.
A tale of two kingdoms
England, at long last, is rediscovering the difference between a crime and a complaint. Scotland still thinks the distinction is “hate-adjacent.” South of the border, the police have rediscovered proportionality. North of it, we have officers deciding whether a Facebook comment constitutes a potential “real risk.” That phrase is as elastic as a Scottish ferry deadline. So here, a disagreement becomes data, a complaint becomes evidence, and an emotion becomes a record.
We’ve replaced justice with journaling.
Compassion as control
The whole system runs on counterfeit compassion. The language of “inclusion” has become a bureaucratic shield for cowardice. Scotland’s moral energy now goes not into confronting wrong, but into managing discomfort.
We are ruled by people who confuse gentleness with goodness, and supervision with virtue. It’s Calvinism without theology, the same lust to condemn, now enforced by HR rather than the Kirk. And as always, the moral panic eats its own children.
The law that claims to protect women is already being used against them, feminists investigated for saying men aren’t women. In modern Scotland, “equality” means everyone gets an equal chance to be accused.
England Recovers, Scotland Regresses: while the Met climbs out of its Orwellian fever dream, Scotland keeps hitting the snooze button. The idea that policing emotion will produce harmony is delusional.
It doesn’t produce safety; it produces silence. If Police Scotland really believe recording every unkind remark prevents harm, they might start with Holyrood’s own speeches. The servers would melt by lunchtime.
Afterword: one law for all
If Scotland truly wants to lead again, it could start by remembering the oldest idea in the book – one law for everyone. Not protected groups. Not ranked sensitivities. Just citizens, equal before the law.
The hate-crime system has turned that principle into a raffle for recognition. Every few years, Holyrood adds another “protected characteristic” to the list like a government adding toppings to a pizza nobody ordered.
Age, race, religion, sexuality, gender identity, now sex. At this rate, left-handed vegans will be next. The result isn’t equality. It’s a caste system in progressive clothing a theology of identity administered by clerks.
The same shove, the same slur, the same crime, punished differently depending on who takes offence. But equality isn’t about categories. It’s about consistency. If a crime is serious enough to prosecute, it’s serious whoever it happens to. If speech becomes a threat, it’s already illegal. We don’t need a hierarchy of hurt to prove that people matter. Scotland has mistaken compassion for control, and inclusion for authority. it wants to prove its virtue statistically with spreadsheets of micro-offence and databases of dissent.
The compassion industry
But compassion, once bureaucratised, curdles into coercion. What began as empathy has become admin. The solution is simple: scrap the taxonomy of grievance. End the competition of protected groups – the Victim Olympics where everyone wants gold for suffering. Restore the radical idea that we are equal because we are human, not because we are labelled. Then, perhaps, we could go back to building ferries instead of filing feelings.
