Police Scotland have replied to my (and many others) concerns about their anti-hate campaign I reported the police to themselves for breaching their own guidelines here
Now they have replied…and it is an astonishing reply –
As you may be aware, the following definitions are used by Police Scotland in relation to hate crimes and incidents.
- A hate crime is any crime which is perceived by the victim or any other person, to be motivated (wholly or partly) by malice and ill-will towards a social group.
- A hate incident is any incident which is perceived by the victim or any other person, to be motivated (wholly or partly) by malice and ill-will towards a social group but which does not constitute a criminal offence (non-crime incident).
Police Scotland has assessed the circumstances you raise. The motivation of the Scottish Government campaign is not based on malice or ill will towards any social group, therefore the circumstances will not be recorded as hate related. Details of your correspondence however have been recorded and the content passed to Scottish Government, Connected Communities Unit.
No further action will be taken.
John McKenzie. Chief Superintendent, Safer Communities
Why is that astonishing? Because the police, or rather Chief Superintendent John McKenzie, seems unaware of his own legislation which states that a hate incident is something that occurs in the ‘perception of the victim or any other person to be motivated by malice or ill will towards a social group’ . It does not matter whether the alleged perpetrator took their actions based on malice or ill will – it’s the perception of the victim that they did which counts. It is a daft criteria but it is the one on which the police say they operate – except apparently when it involves themselves. Even though many people regard this and have reported it as a hate incident, the police say that the motivation of the perpetrators (the Scottish Government and the Police) was not based on malice or ill will and therefore this will not be reported as a hate incident – no further action will be taken (and presumably this won’t go down in their official records as a reported hate incident – it appears that some hate incidents are more equal than others!).
What is the Bigger Picture?
The question then is are the police hierarchy so illogical that they can’t see the contradiction between their laws and their actions? Or does this really show us what the bigger picture is? This poster campaign is not about stopping ‘hate’ against all people – it’s a selective campaign based upon a political ideology designed to discriminate in favour of certain groups and against others. The idea is that those selected groups which fit into this ideology are encouraged to report as much as possible, so that the Government can then say that the police have indicated a rise in the number of transphobic, Islamaphobic, homophobic etc crimes – and thus justify spending more money funding their own organisations which in turn need to report an increase in victimhood. The ideological victimhood gravy train is a lucrative one to catch!
The bottom line is that our police have become the thought police whose purpose is not just to prevent crime, but to impose the State doctrines. In this they work in conjunction with the education system (now used more for social engineering than actual education) and increasingly the legal system, although as the Ashers case shows our judiciary still maintain a degree of independence. The only thing that will prevent this going deeper is if we manage to maintain a free press, freedom of speech and freedom of religion although all of these are increasingly under attack.
Thats why the Scottish police and legal system spent so much time and money prosecuting a ‘daft laddie’ from Glasgow who made a silly video on the internet – watch this incredible story about Police Scotland and the Nazi dog. Thanks to Spiked for this great piece of journalism.
(I hope I don’t need to point out that I find the video Count Dankula posted offensive and distasteful – but I don’t want everyone or everything I find offensive or distasteful arrested and prosecuted – if that happened the whole country would become a prison!)
Back in 1996, I wrote that we can’t understand the universe, in any useful way, without accepting that it exists beyond our consciousness. Throughout my adult life I’ve believed that words matter, as they are our thoughts made (metaphorical) flesh, and so are also real objects in that same universe they are attempting to describe. Words are real things, with power.
Increasingly, and terrifyingly, only the last sentence of that paragraph holds water. Words have power, all right, but their actual meaning (define “hate crime”) no longer matters. Facts don’t matter. Biology doesn’t matter. History doesn’t matter. The truth is whatever the pathologically subjective declares it to be.
The Spectator also covered this in another perceptive article from Toby Young – Shouldn’t the Police be chasing down theft and assault and not thought crime
I was contacted by a serving police office who says that this kind of stuff is doing their heads in and he completely agreed. Young makes the same point.
Ordinary coppers don’t want to be spending their days chasing down thought criminals,
obviously. Last month, the new head of the Police Federation complained that his 120,000 members were being forced to follow up hate crime reports when they would much rather be investigating burglaries, two-thirds of which were not properly investigated by the police last year. It’s their managers who are at fault, such as the bright spark at South Yorkshire Police who encouraged Twitter users to report ‘non-crime hate incidents’ — episodes so trivial they don’t even meet the absurdly capacious definition of a hate crime.
The police have time and money to run these kind of campaigns. Meanwhile I think of a friend who went down to the city centre police station to report a serious threat (his local police station has been closed and phoning the centralised police phone number results in someone in Glasgow not knowing the local area at all), only to find that it was unstaffed. In Scotland we have moved from having several police forces to having one centralised one – although this was done for financial reasons a side effect is that it makes it much easier for the police to become the instrument of the State – a State which is seeking to impose its ideology on everyone (remember that these posters tell you that if you don’t agree with them you are ‘not Scotland’).
Haters aren't gonna hate here – Scotland has a zero tolerence approach to hate crime 💙 #LiveScotland #ScotlandIsNow #NHCAW #No2Hate pic.twitter.com/73DsOSwbTX
— Scotland Is Now 🏴 (@Scotland) October 13, 2018
Our society is moving more and more towards this totalitarian thought police society. One of many responses I received shows how this is infecting the workplace as well – and in the same way. Remember that this is not about stopping ‘hate’, it’s about promoting one ideology and denigrating others. ” I was asked at work to sign a document that said if I offended someone on social media, it would be construed as workplace harassment. So far I’ve refused, out of genuine concern that this could be used to clobber me over the head from an LGBTQI+ perspective, but there is a definite pattern here.”
One final thought – this is not just a ‘religious’ thing. Others who have contacted me include atheists, secularists and those who often don’t agree with me…
Hi David, Really appreciate your article – I am not religious but wholeheartedly agree with the sentiments regarding the ‘campaign’ of intolerance by the Scottish Gov/Police Scotland.
My name’s … and I’m from …. and I’m a lesbian. I just want to say that I fully support you and I think these posters are terrible too. So do a lot of my friends. We don’t feel like Christians hate us and we don’t hate Christians either. I reported the poster as a hate crime against religious people and then I found out you’d done it too and I had to send you a quick message. Hopefully you’re not getting too much abuse from young people who identify as queer and non binary.
I find it increasingly the case that I am on the same side as some feminists and gay activists (at least in this area of free speech) whilst the rich and powerful (including some of the clergy – I was even told that the State Church had ‘approved’ these posters) think that this kind of State sponsored indoctrination and suppression of free speech is fine. Its a strange world…..