By Lois McLatchie

IT’S been almost a year since the controversial Hate Crime and Public Order Act received enough votes in parliament to become law. Yet in practice, become law, it has not. The government are still “working with justice partners” in order to realise “effective implementation”. At any rate, Police Scotland have had to ask the government for permission not to comply with the new law until next year.

Given that the legislation expects police to control even what is said around family dinner tables, it’s hardly any wonder that they’re facing difficulties in putting the wildly censorial ideas into practice.

Though perhaps not yet able to make changes regarding law enforcement, the law has brought in a troubling cultural sea-change. Police Scotland have faced a tidal rise in reports of “hate” instances, including a 76% rise in those which relate to transgender issues. Calum Steele, general secretary of the Scottish Police Federation, has attributed much of this increase to people taking offence to things they read on social media such as Twitter.

For those following big names like JK Rowling on the social media giant, Steele’s analysis may not come as much of a shock. When Rowling challenged the erasure of the word “woman” in exchange for the verbiage “people who menstruate”, the author was accused by the celebrity Twitteratti to be not only “literal scum” and “actively hurting children”; but even, as one US attorney put it, “feeding a genocidal impulse”.

You might say that all is fair in love and culture war. The world’s best-selling author knows what she’s in for when she stirs the troubled Twitter waters. Her outspoken comments on biological womanhood have sparked wars of words between ardent activists across the globe.

But giving legal teeth to the baying mob makes a significant change. Giving serious credence to accusations of Rowling being genocidally “harmful” for supporting women-only rape shelters would move the needle from “cancel culture” to true authoritarianism. Any hope of lively debate or meaningful engagement is swallowed up in place of a chilling fear of arrest for expressing one’s views.

Over the summer, the feminist Marion Miller’s case represented a close shave with a legalised “cancel culture”. The Scottish businesswoman was accused of “transphobia” for her social media posts, including one of a suffragette ribbon. Thankfully, charges were dropped, after an emotional and financial ordeal. But a look over to the Scandanavian horizon can show us the coming chill for those who follow in Marion’s footsteps, should our paper hate speech law become reality.

Today, Finland’s own JK Rowling is back in court, on criminal trial for a tweet. Päivi Räsänen, a long-serving member of parliament, former government minister and grandmother of seven, was accused of “hate speech”. In the now infamous tweet – which never broke any rules on Twitter’s code of conduct and remains online to this day – she asked her church leadership where in the Bible they found justification to sponsor the Helsinki Pride parade. She attached an image of Bible verses.

Räsänen has also been charged with writing a pamphlet about sexuality for her church in 2004, and for a soundbite taken from a radio interview in 2019. Her bishop, by the way, is also on trial – for publishing that almost two-decade-old pamphlet for the church congregation. Specifically, the pair are being charged with having committed “ethnic agitation”, under the section of “war crimes and crimes against humanity” in the Finnish criminal code.

It’s ironic that Scotland’s hate crime act simultaneously repealed our old “blasphemy” law. Every detail of Räsänen’s trial resembles a witch hunt for “heresy” against the approved orthodoxy of the day. On the first day in court last month, the prosecutor grilled the politician and the bishop on their theology. Do you follow Finnish law, or the Bible? Was the resounding question. Until now, the bishop remarked, he’d never been asked to choose.

The Finnish case is a canary in the coalmine for what happens when you arm a hyperbolic Twitter mob with the legal grounds to censor free speech. Scotland should take note, and be sure to double down on protections for Rowling, and all women with an opinion to share.

Lois McLatchie is a writer for ADF UK, an international Christian think tank