UKIP Scotland
This dumb, unjust law is Salmond's first own goal
Friday, 16th December 2011
Iain MacWhirter in a recent article in the Herald Scotland writes: This is an unjust law which has been criticised by almost every legal body that has reviewed it. It has achieved the impossible: uniting Rangers and Celtic, the Church of Scotland and the Church of Rome, lawyers, civil liberties organisations, the Conservative Party and the Greens – in opposition to it.
It has been frog-marched through Parliament by an act of elective dictatorship. This is Alex Salmond's first own goal, if you'll excuse the pun. He should have listened to Parliament and dumped it last summer when he had the chance. The only hope now is that courts and juries will treat it with the contempt it deserves.
Behaviour liable to lead to public disorder is already illegal. Section 38 of the Criminal Justice Act 2010 outlaws "threatening or abusive" behaviour "likely to cause a reasonable person to suffer fear or alarm". The Offensive Behaviour Bill takes the law into an entirely different realm altogether, into subjective hate crime. It will criminalise thought and behaviour that other groups might find offensive. Well, someone should tell the FM and his MSP clones that the right to offend people is the most basic right in any democracy.
Now that this law will be applied in football stadiums, there will inevitably be pressure to extend it to workplaces, public spaces, parks, meetings, concert halls, theatres, cinemas. schools – indeed anywhere where "offensive" ideas might be ventilated. For if they are illegal in one public setting how can they possibly be legal in another? How could films like Michael Collins, about the IRA leader, be shown in Glasgow cinemas? Should Scottish Nationalists be allowed to chant the bloody anti-English dirge, Scots Wha Hae, at Bannockburn? That's threatening and offensive. The Edinburgh Festival Fringe will become a playground for litigants claiming to be offended and threatened by productions like Singing I'm No A Billy I'm a Tim.
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