I FOUND it easy to agree with most of Kevin McKenna’s polemic ("Humza Yousaf’s Hate Crime at Home Bill is deranged", The Herald, October 31), a sentiment with which I am unfamiliar, but the vitriol he so liberally dispensed over Humza Yousaf's Hate Crime Bill, was entirely justified

At present, all speech, conversations and the like within a private home are protected by a “dwelling defence", which renders them safe from prosecution in terms of public order or hate crimes.

As Mr Yousaf made clear and not merely in a tweet but in evidence to Holyrood's Justice Committee, he wants to remove this dwelling defence and potentially criminalise any speech or conversation in people’s homes. Hate speech must be prosecuted even when it’s in the home, he says.

The Hate Crime Bill contains much that is objectionable, as the level and breadth of opposition to it shows, but prosecuting individuals for comments made within their own homes takes it to another level.

The potential consequences of this dangerous authoritarianism, promoted by a Government which laughably describes itself as “progressive", should not need to be spelled out to anyone with even a passing knowledge of 20th century European history.

I was brought up in the years after the Second World War, when we were frequently told that "sticks and stones may break your bones but words will never harm you". The freedom of speech, in public, we enjoyed at that time is long gone and the ubiquitous "sticks and stones..." has been replaced by the equally ubiquitous "you can't say that".

Extending the law further, into private homes, as Mr Yousaf wants, provides a chilling preview of a future which not many Scots would ever have imagined.

If the SNP won't call a halt to this dangerous nonsense now, Parliament as a whole must.

Sandy MacAlister, Shiskine, Isle of Arran.

COULD there be a more silly manifestation of the flawed Hate Crime Bill than the proposed criminalisation of domestic dinner table chat?

We all test ideas and hypothetical positions in a spirit of safe dialectic exploration with friends and family who know our true souls.

To legislate for there to be no difference between private discourse and public statement is chillingly close to The Thought Police.

Neil Barber, Edinburgh Secular Society, Edinburgh EH12.

I WONDER if Hamza Yousaf would let me know if under his proposed legislation on Hate Crime whether I would be fined or jailed for calling him a clown?

Michael Watson, Glasgow G73.