WHEN you are a young child and you really want to emphasise displeasure with something, your parents or green vegetables, then the word most commonly used is hate.
Every parent has at one time or another been hit with the venomous cry of “I hate you!”.
Your crime normally ranges from refusing a biscuit to turning off the TV at bedtime, but they all illicit the same response from tired children, to be fair almost exclusively boys.
It is the same with food they don’t agree with, mainly vegetables, which bring on snots and tears and a very loud I HATE this in amongst it all.
They soon grow out of it and hate becomes a word that is less frequently used, because as an adult there are very few things on a daily basis that invoke such emotions.
But the word is about to be used much more frequently from next month with the passing of the controversial hate crime bill which comes into force on April 1.
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Of course, most of it is already covered in the current hate crime bill but ministers clearly felt that not enough people were being convicted so they changed it.
While it consolidated some existing hate crime laws, it created a new offence of stirring up hatred against protected characteristics, including age, disability, religion, sexual orientation and gender identity.
Earlier this week, ministers launched a public awareness campaign highlighting the new law and to “encourage those who have witnessed or experienced a hate crime to report it.”
One way to report a hate crime is through a third party reporting centre.
A list of these centres on Police Scotland’s website includes Monaghan Mushrooms in North Berwick, and Farne Salmon & Trout in Duns, which is one of the largest smoked salmon facilities in Europe.
This gives you the option of reporting a hate crime while also ordering a kilo of shiitake mushrooms or a side of smoked salmon, which is good news I suppose.
But it is clear that the new law will take up an awful lot of police officers’ valuable time as they investigate every single report, however spurious it may appear. Professor Adam Tomkins, the John Millar Chair of Public Law at the University of Glasgow’s law school, said officers risked being swamped by complaints made by people who were “offended, upset, hurt or distressed by something someone else has said”.
It is hard to disagree with this. Hate crime is abhorrent and any move to tighten up legislation should be welcomed but this bill has been three years in the making due to concerns about various aspects of it.
One thing that is clear however, is there will inevitably be a huge rise in the number of complaints which could lead to genuine victims of a hate crime being ignored which is not helpful for anyone. Police officers have raised concerns about the number of ‘third party reporting vehicles’.
Calum Steele, the former general secretary of the Scottish Police Federation summed it by saying: “I suspect that within a very short period of time we will have ‘data’ suggesting Scotland to be one of the most ‘hateful’ counties on earth. This Jackanory data will be used to justify an endless drive to deliver a Pygmalion utopia.”
It is even harder to disagree with that - whether you love it or hate it.
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