Process as punishment
Welcome, readers, to what may be the final week of Wings Over Scotland.
We’ve been covering the Scottish Government’s horrific, draconian Hate Crime Act for almost four years now. But until this month, we hadn’t felt directly under threat by it. Wings is – sorry if this comes as a shock to anyone – based in Bath, in England, and we couldn’t see how the Scottish police could come after us.
But then they were informed that Scottish law holds that anything on social media which can be read in Scotland is published in Scotland.
…then lawyer after lawyer queued up to support his interpretation, and we became alarmed. Along with JK Rowling, For Women Scotland and Murray Blackburn Mackenzie, it’s hard to think of anyone the transgender cult would rather bring down than Wings Over Scotland, and the Hate Crime Act puts that goal firmly in reach.
They would not have to achieve any sort of criminal conviction to do so. The point of the law, with its basically non-existent threshold for “hate”, is to terrorise those with views that are unpalatable to the Scottish Government out of voicing their opinions at all, via a method often called “process as punishment”.
Wings has already experienced the technique. In 2017, under a very similar law, I was subjected to a malicious, ridiculous allegation of “harassment” by a journalist whose work we’d critiqued, and arrested. I was dragged off to a police station, thrown in a cell, detained for 15 hours, and then released just before midnight, 10 miles from home in a remote and unfamiliar location with no money and no mobile phone, and told to make my own way back.
The police kept all his phones, tablets, laptops and desktops, so he had to spend several thousand pounds to replace them all.
And the purpose of the Hate Crime Act is to menace dissident voices with the prospect of being put through that more or less constantly.
Because no sooner would we have replaced one set of confiscated gear than another barrage of complaints would arrive from transactivists, another arrest and confiscation would follow, and the cycle would repeat until we either closed the site down or were swiftly bankrupt.
The principle is similar (in both method and its intended target) to that of the infamous 1913 Prisoners Temporary Discharge for Ill-Health Act, commonly referred to as the “Cat And Mouse Act”, which was deployed against the Suffragettes.
Just keep arresting people who have broken no law until they give up.
The object was to put women under relentless stress and keep them perpetually cycling in and out of prison in order to break their resistance. But in this case the heroic strength shown by the Suffragettes is not enough by itself to overcome the tactic, because neither we nor FWS nor MBM or any of Scotland’s other gender-critical voices have access to an infinite supply of money to keep buying new electronics.
(JK Rowling probably does, but the police aren’t going to be stupid enough to arrest her in a million years. Foul-mouthed oiks like Wings and working-class women like FWS are much easier targets, as we’ve already seen in the ludicrous cases of women like Jennifer Swayne and Marion Millar, arrested and dragged to court for stickers and ribbons. FWS have also been warned by Police Scotland that the phrase “Women Won’t Wheesht” might constitute a hate crime.)
All this for the sake of…penniless migrants? Refugees? Victims of racism? Women subject to violence? Workers? People with disabilities? Orphans? Victims of sex trafficking?
No. All this for men who enjoy pretending to be women.
And politicians aren’t immune. Tory MSP Murdo Fraser, who opposed the Act in a fine illustration of the “stopped clock” principle, revealed at the weekend that he now has a “Non-Crime Hate Incident” recorded against his name for saying “Choosing to identify as ‘non-binary’ is as valid as choosing to identify as a cat. I’m not sure governments should be spending time on action plans for either.”
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Wings, therefore, after a few brief chats with lawyers, finds itself forced to seriously consider its position, and that means taking proper advice. We have commissioned, and await, a formal legal opinion from a very senior Scottish KC with expertise in the field about whether it’s safe for the site and its social media accounts to continue to exist, either in their current forms or some kind of censored ones.
It’s not clear to me how this works. Is the problem that Scotland has jurisdiction over Scots no matter where they are? Wings has to take proper advice because Rev. Stuart Campbell is from Scotland, so they can reach out and nab him even though he’s in Bath? Scotland has a special, peculiar to Scotland “hate crime” law but it gets to arrest people under that law even in England and Wales?
Maybe the Rev could change citizenship?
New post by Wings: The Great Genocide: “We decided to do some research and see if we could find a pattern of hate crimes being committed against transgender people since the Bill was introduced almost four years ago. …”
It doesn’t matter whether the person is Scottish, they merely have to be suspected of committing a crime in Scotland and to be in the UK for an arrest to be made. As the new law is worded, it appears than anybody in the UK posting anything on social media that can be seen in Scotland and is considered an offensive statement under the Hate Crime Act is liable to arrest, and again from the vague wording it seems that the statement doesn’t have to be about anybody or anything in Scotland itself.
In theory, if I posted on Twitter something as simple as ‘Transwomen are men’ or ‘vegans annoy me’, then anybody reading it in Scotland could report me to the Scottish police who, if they could identify me, would be able to request my local constabulary to arrest and detain me and either take me to Scotland or hold me until the Scottish police collect me and take me to Scotland for questioning*.
I really can’t see how this could possibly work in practice given the incredibly vague definition in the Act of what actually constitutes ‘hate’, because of the truism that anything and everything will offend somebody: the potential is there for Scottish Police and their English, Welsh, and Northern Irish counterparts to be swamped with complaints and arrests from day one.
* The actual arrest procedure is set out in the Letter of Rights which is provided to people held in police custody in England, Wales and Northern Ireland who are suspected of committing an offence in Scotland.
https://www.gov.scot/publications/letter-rights-cross-border-arrest/
There is apparently an expression among some law enforcement types that “you can beat the rap, but you can’t beat the ride.” Meaning that if cops decide to arrest you and drive you around in the back of their squad car for hours before processing you (typically so that it’s too late to arraign you until the next day and you have to spend the night in jail before you can get bail set), then you’re not getting that time and inconvenience back even if the charges are quickly dropped or dismissed.
This is also why I get so ranty about speech-restrictive laws being dangerous even when they’re supposedly only targeted at things that you don’t think deserve legal protection. They absolutely WILL be abused to harass people for things that are clearly protected, and the threat of this will chill people from doing perfectly legal things that they fear will piss off the wrong cop, prosecutor, etc.
It’s also analogous to many of the anti-abortion laws being passed in the wake of the Dobbs decision. “What are you so worried about,” ask Republicans, “this law specifically makes it an affirmative defense if the abortion was necessary to save the mother’s life!” Great, so if a doctor performs an abortion, then he or she will have an opportunity to try to persuade a jury that the exception applies and they shouldn’t be convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison, and if it works, then all that will happen is that they’ll have spent months if not years awaiting trial, spent six or seven figures on legal fees, and probably had their practice suspended in the interim. That sounds like something that a prudent doctor would be willing to endure just to help one patient!
Tl;dr version: vague laws suck, and saying that judges or juries will eventually sort it out doesn’t cure the suckitude.
Aos @ 2 –
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words fail me. I sort of thought it meant that but also thought that can’t be possible.
Silly me.
You say “in theory” and “could” but…I’m not sure why. If they can, they can. It’s not really in theory any more.
Why isn’t there more outrage about this?
[…] a comment by Screechy Monkey on Process as […]
Don’t really understand this at all… non-Scottish police would somehow be required to enforce Scottish law outside of Scotland? This is akin to antebellum slavery laws (and ultimately resulted in the ACW because it just isn’t tenable for a state to require that sort of thing of another)…
You’d think just staying the fuck out of Scotland would be sufficient.
Apparently they already are. See Acolyte of Sagan’s link:
https://www.gov.scot/publications/letter-rights-cross-border-arrest/
I don’t know, maybe I shouldn’t be that surprised. States here in the United ones have their own laws, and I think states co-operate with each other on law enforcement. United States; United Kingdom; similar kind of thing. See abortion: suddenly it’s not a federal right any more, but in some states it’s still legal. Yousaf’s law is reminiscent of the Dobbs ruling in that way.
@BKIISA #6
It’s not just returning runaway enslaved people, it also applies to other people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extradition_Clause