Politics - The Non-Brexit Thread.

It's not April 1st but Sunak is definitely taking the piss. Jonathan Gullis has been appointed a Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party

BBC: How is Scotland's new hate crime law going?



Bit of a long read so here are a few key points:

The fact that, so far at least, no one has been criminalised in Scotland for "saying common sense things", might have been less surprising to a parade of lawyers and academics who had warned in advance that the new law was being misrepresented around the world.

"I've not seen any sensible lawyer who thinks misgendering will become a crime tomorrow," wrote Roddy Dunlop KC, Dean of the Faculty of Advocates, on the eve of the act coming into force.

Dr Andrew Tickell, a law lecturer at Glasgow Caledonian University, insisted the legislation had a relatively high bar for criminality, stressing its free speech provisions, including a "right" to express ideas that "offend, shock or disturb."

Even Adam Tomkins, a professor of public law at Glasgow University who actually voted against the bill when he was a Conservative MSP (because he objected to its applying in private homes) agreed that it was "fairly safe" in terms of free speech.

"It's not a hate crime under this legislation to misgender somebody," he told BBC Scotland News, adding "even if somebody finds it really upsetting, really offensive, it's not a hate crime because it's not something that a reasonable person would regard as a threat or as abusive."

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Within the Scottish government, there is a deep sense of frustration that so much of this week's public and media debate has focused on the issue of gender rather than the other protected characteristics in the act.

....the SNP-led government could have proposed including specific protection for women as a group in the law rather than tackling that issue separately.

It could have included a specific free-speech clause relating to the belief that a man cannot become a woman.

It could have taken language in the bill which protects expressions of "antipathy, dislike, ridicule or insult" towards religion, and applied it to related protected characteristics, which include age, disability, sexual orientation, transgender identity and being intersex.

Instead of supporting a criminal threshold for "stirring up hatred" of behaviour that was either threatening or abusive, for those characteristics, it could have required it to be both threatening and abusive (on top of the existing requirement to prove intent).

That's not necessarily to say the Scottish government should have done any of those things - but that the way the bill has been received flows at least in part from its decisions not to do them.