No one can get up much enthusiasm for a Government which puts you in jail if you open your mouth. -George Orwell

Imagine a world where you cannot speak aloud your thoughts for fear they upset someone.

Imagine living in a dystopian nightmare where the very act of uttering “Men Are Not Women, and Other Uncomfortable Truths” within the sanctum of your own home could precipitate the police logging a “hate incident” against your name. A realm where legally enshrined rights to voice such opinions are rendered meaningless, eclipsed solely by another’s perception of offence.

For the benighted souls trapped in the SNP’s Scotland, this Orwellian nightmare becomes reality come Monday. And no, this is no April Fool’s prank – merely the latest assault on free expression by bureaucratic authoritarians masquerading as progressives.

The misnamed Hate and Public Order Act is a sinister paean to the East German Stasi – a state-sanctioned battering ram against civil liberties. Ostensibly an “update” consolidating prior hate laws, it radically extends criminal “hatred” to encompass age, disability, gender identities and “variations in sex characteristics.” not for actual crimes, no we would be happy at that, but these are perceived slights, thoughtcrimes.

These perceived slights could precipitate the police logging a “hate incident” against your name. A Kafkaesque nightmare where legally enshrined rights to free expression are rendered null – all that matters is whether the words fallen upon another’s ears were perceived as offensive.

This Napoleonic legal code deems the mere perception of offensive speech sufficient grounds for prosecutorial overreach. The thought police now have sardonic licence to seize personal property, ransack devices for any infinitesimal digital transgression that might constitute “hatred” of protected categories.

As Craig Murray former UK ambassador and Workers party candidate for Blackburn points out the Scottish government is taking an extremely broad and overreaching interpretation of what constitutes “publication” under its new draconian Hate Crime and Public Order Act coming into force on April 1st.

By their reckoning, any online content viewable within Scottish borders is considered “published in Scotland”, regardless of where the material originated or the residence of the publisher. This expansive notion echoes the controversial grounds which have fueled London’s international “libel tourism” industry.

Crucially, the Act contains no geographical limitations on its enforcement powers. This potentially means any person anywhere in the world could face Scottish police investigation and prosecution over alleged “hate” material has a protected characteristic, merely if it is accessed and reported by someone in Scotland.

Past legal precedents have seen writers jailed for contempt over online posts from France, and interrogated by Scottish police for material published in Iceland by Craig Murray – suggesting authorities will apply this alarming jurisdictional overreach zealously. From April 1st, critics fear a deluge of spurious third-party reports could ensnare innumerable online commentators in the Act’s Orwellian maw for the crime of ideological dissent.

The Scottish government’s refusal to include geographic limits in its legislation suggests a contemptuous disregard for modern realities of digital discourse and free expression. In its zeal to appease identitarian cabals, it appears willing to transform the internet into a globalized sSotischance panopticon – where any belief for the Approved Orthodoxy constitutes a potential thoughtcrime.

The lesson here is if you’re going to Scotland make sure you have never tweeted anything remotely controversial.

This tweet is intended very seriously. Please read and understand it.
Scottish law holds that anything on social media which can be read in Scotland is published in Scotland.
Clive Thomson was jailed for contempt of court for material he published in France. I have been…

— Craig Murray (@CraigMurrayOrg) March 15, 2024

Meanwhile, Police Scotland – which has just announced it will no longer investigate certain low-level crimes – is diverting resources so it can investigate the expected influx of accusatory phone calls it will receive from those offended by other people’s opinions.

The force has promised to investigate every hate crime complaint it receives, and if the complainant (or victim, as they are officially referred to) insists they were upset by something they perceived to be a hate crime, it will be logged as a non-crime hate incident (NCHI) even if there is not a shred of evidence of any crime being committed.

Ch Supt Rob Hay has said new Scottish hate crime laws which take effect on Monday could risk damaging public trust in the force.

Nothing says "have confidence in our robust training package" like saying it was co-designed by internal staff lobby groups, keeping it secret, and writing about it (without including it) to MSPs a week late, on the last day before recess. https://t.co/hbjllfNOXM

— Lucy HunterBlackburn (@LucyHunterB) March 31, 2024

Ch Supt Rob Hay, from the Association of Scottish Police Superintendents (ASPS), said people could feel “aggrieved” if they are reported under the legislation and have their details recorded, even if they have not committed a crime.

He also told the BBC the force has not been given any additional resources to cope. The Hate and Public Order (Scotland) Act, external – which comes into force on 1 April – criminalises threatening or abusive behaviour which is intended to stir up hatred based on certain characteristics including age, disability, sexual orientation and transgender identity.

Ch Supt Hay told the BBC’s Sunday Show that when the criminal threshold for the legislation is not met the force would still record details.

“So there are two ways potentially that we could damage trust and confidence in the police – around whether the police response meets with expectations, and whether have the police exceeded themselves in involving themselves in non-criminal matters.”

Recently Police Scotland criticised “inaccurate” reports that officers would target performers including comedians under the Hate Crime Act.

It came after details of a two-hour online course to train officers in the new law were leaked to the press. This included a slide that said “threatening or abusive material” could be communicated “through public performance of a play”.

But early guidance suggests that even scripted “public performance” could constitute punishable hate if sufficiently “threatening or abusive” to a protected group’s sensibilities. The very spirit of satire lies shackled on this secular altar to identitarian puritanism.

Let’s be honest even in the face of police denials, which comedian would dare face the SNP’speech-batons, to do so would mean being branded with the words “Hate crime” attached to your performance review, and we all witnessed last year’s controversy at the Edinburgh Fringe’s Battle between Comedy and Cancel Culture.

Ch Supt Hay continued to say his primary concern was around resourcing as well as making sure members of the public are clear about the parameters of the law.

He also said the idea that police would target performers “couldn’t be further from the truth”.

“Not only do the police not have the resource to do something like that, but that is not how we operate around this sort of offence,” he said.

“We are driven by public reporting and we respond to that public reporting as a result of it.

“So expectations in some quarters are likely to be very high around about the level of police intervention but whether or not we will be able to achieve what people are looking for us to achieve in respect of this will only be found at the conclusion of any investigation.”

Politicians have warned that the new law will be “weaponised” by the radical trans lobby to criminalise anyone who states their belief in the immutability of someone’s birth sex.

Little wonder that women’s rights campaigners fear that the new law will be used by trans radicals to settle scores and silence anyone who dares to challenge their worldview.

In this tale, there’s no omnipresent authority figure like Big Brother; instead, it’s ordinary citizens who are encouraged to contact the police if they’re offended by someone else’s disagreement. They can even make anonymous complaints through a network of “Hate Crime Third Party Reporting Centres,” including unexpected locations like university campuses, a Glasgow sex shop named Luke & Jack, and even a salmon factory in Berwickshire. Susan Smith, a director at For Women Scotland, paints a grim picture of Scotland’s future under this system.

She remarks, “We’re facing the possibility of countless local informants anonymously passing reports to the police. Some individuals seem rather pleased about this and plan to report anyone they dislike. It’s reminiscent of the Stasi and utterly absurd.” Despite the absurdity, this is the reality Scotland finds itself in under the SNP’s governance.

All this, even as official figures confirm hate crimes are in decline across Scotland. The SNP authorities have diverted desperately needed resources from combating real crime towards this farcical moral panic over wrongspeak and wrongthink.

Gender critics rightly warn that this Gleichschaltung will be weaponized by the radical trans lobby to criminalize any dissent from their quasi-religious dogma of self-identification. People in Scotland now inviting prosecution by daring to insist biological reality precludes men from simply identifying as women, even thought the Scottish high court has declared a man cannot self-identify as a woman by law.

@AshReganALBA speech in full. 👏 pic.twitter.com/yaULQOomIF

— For Women Scotland (@ForWomenScot) March 26, 2024

This latest foray into legislating unchallengeable orthodoxies is unnecessary, illiberal and profoundly anti-democratic. In their zeal to transcend the primitive binaries of biological reality, our new make-believe overlords have jettisoned the most foundational liberal tenets of an open society.

Rationalising such authoritarianism as a mere logical extension of “progress”, the SNP regime has revealed its true, anti-humanist colours. If unchecked, their mission to enforce a ruthless, egalitarian monolith of compelled speech will leave our ancient civil liberties as desiccated husks on Scotland’s salted cultural soil.

This draconian edict’s vagueness and selectiveness in upholding the rights to “dislike, ridicule, and insult” religious belief while conspicuously omitting the other anointed shibbolethic identities is perhaps its most sinister aspect. For it implicitly demotes philosophies rooted in material reality to thoughtcrimes subordinate to the prevailing ludditry’s sacred cows.

With even the Scottish Police Federation voicing concerns over resourcing this authoritarian overreach, one wonders whether the SNP’s virtue-exhibitionist architects have any cogent motive beyond cynical point-scoring with their navel-gazing base. Certainly, the empirical statistics show hate crime in steady decline despite their clamorous insistence of the opposite.

As a Panglossian unity of woke capitalists and state authoritarians consummates its marriage, the very right to acknowledge biological reality is now theuted counterculture’s most unforgivable heresy. Until a true workers’ movement emerges to shatter these bourgeois identitarian illusions, all that remains is to resist – or be condemned to the Orwellian pyre of 2024’s latest blasphemy.