Anti-sectarian Bill passed after Alex Salmond’s pressure

16 December 2011

Alex Salmond’s antisectarian Bill was pushed through the Scottish Parliament by 64 to 57 votes.

The Offensive Behaviour at Football and Threatening Communications (Scotland) Bill was passed on 14/12/2011.

This subject shot to the top of the SNP agenda following threatening behaviour early in 2011 related to football rivalry.  However the Bill attempts the impossible by legislating for hatred.  What used to be called a sin, our Government wants to make a crime - a thought crime.

Originally Salmond wanted a Bill before the football season began, but he was stopped in his tracks by a joint legal challenge from CARE and the Christian Institute.  This unseemly haste was mentioned in the Scottish Christian Party’s recent submission on redefining marriage.  It spoke of “the undue haste in trying to pass a Bill against sectarianism. The Bill against stalking highlighted the inability of paid individuals to do their job, and the Bill against sectarianism only alarms us that our legislators cannot see the consequences of their own actions. The Scottish Christian Party has lost confidence in our legislature to produce balanced legislation.”  This view was echoed in the Parliamentary debate in which the Opposition spoke against the lack of consensus and consultation, but particularly against the poor drafting of the Bill itself.

       

Community Safety Minister Roseanna Cunningham, tasked with piloting this Bill, has demonstrated herself to be not up to the task as she failed to gain much cross-party support.  Speaking for the Opposition, Scottish Labour MSP James Kelly said it would be wrong for the Scottish government to “railroad the legislation through” and that it was “bad practice to be breaking up the consenus on such an important issue”.  This was the first piece of legislation in the new Parliament, but there was no consensus behind it “in the parliament or outside”.  At the last minute, the Government accepted only one amendment, from Green MSP Patrick Harvie.  However, Labour had not put forward any amendments at Stage 2 of the Bill.

In his television interviews on the subject Alex Salmond is showing the same impatience as David Cameron when he complained that it was time to act.  When the First Minister intervened to this effect at Stage 3 of the Bill’s passage through the Scottish Parliament, James Kelly referred to his need “to take care of” his Minister’s incompetent handling of the Bill’s progress.  There were a multitude of objections to the Bill from many different respectable organisations, but the SNP drove forward regardless.

Definition
The mere presentation of the Bill is sending out mixed messages.  Christine Graham, SNP, said that the word sectarian does not occur in the Bill, yet when Roseanna Cunningham opened the debate she referred to sectarianism more than once.  In her summing up at the end she clearly saw this as the first shot in the future war against sectarianism.

A society that has tolerated lies and swearing now finds it difficult to define what they call offensive behaviour.  The ill-defined definition and its lack of specification was highlighted throughout the debate.

Christine Graham said that “offensive behaviour” must also be threatening and expressing hatred, or what a reasonable person would consider offensive.  One must look at the facts and circumstances; “a word” can be used one way or another way.  It must be an incitement to public disorder.  At long weary last, we detect a slight improvement on the subjective definition of offence which has prevailed since the Macpherson Report on the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry published in February 1999 defined racism in subjective terms - “A racist incident is any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person” - and which the SCP has been publicising for four years.  We need an objective definition and slowly, far too slowly, our legal system is moving towards it.

Free speech clause
Although a free-speech clause has been inserted, Colin Hart, Director of The Christian Institute, expressed reservations about future changes to the legislation: “We remain concerned that Ministers have awarded themselves the ability to add additional grounds to the religious hatred offence at a later date.”  The Church of Scotland shares this concern saying that the “potential to criminalise a far wider range of behaviour than its stated purpose”, as well as low levels of support was “deeply concerning”.

Are we moving towards a police state?
David McLetchie, MSP for the Conservatives, criticised the “something must be done” syndrome of the SNP Government and the granting of new police powers upon asking for them.  Many MSPs complained that the Bill was unworkable, illiberal and hurried.

1. The Law Society said that the existing legislation was adequate.  We already have laws to deal with criminal behaviour.  Several contributors pointed out that we do not give the police powers on their demand.

2. This legislation aims at policing a particular section of the population at particular times rather than aiming at changing hearts.  This is an implicit acknowledgment that our educational system is not working and so anxious government reach for more policing in an authoritarian manner.  Alex Salmond’s anxious response is a knee-jerk reaction to the events of and around the Old Firm game on 3/3/2011, and it is similar to David Cameron’s knee-jerk reactions to the English city riots.  The SCP complained that David Cameron had reached for the big stick for his broken society and that he did not have the charisma to speak to the nation at a time of trouble, but this cannot be said of Alex Salmond who has both the charisma and the ear of the people of Scotland.  This makes it less excusable for him for him to follow this authoritarian line.  It seems that our leaders cannot diagnose what is wrong with our society; and wrong diagnosis is likely to lead to the wrong treatment.

3. There have been many examples of insensitive policing, and extending police powers without general consensus will make their task even more difficult.

4. Roseanna Cunningham concluded her opening remarks by saying that this is “the first necessary step in a longer journey”.  In her summing up speech she said that once this legislation is passed, the Parliament will need to get on with dealing with sectarianism.  This is evidence that this is the thin end of the wedge.  However, at no point in the debate was it mentioned or noted that, from the perspective of Europe, evangelical Christians are considered to be a sect.  It will be interesting to see if the SNP Government will consider offensive behaviour against the beliefs and practices of evangelical Christians to be sectarianism, or whether it will be reversed and evangelical Christians beliefs and behaviour will be considered sectarian.  As the recent SCP submission on the Government’s attempt to redefine marriage states: “We will watch with interest to see who are the first group to fall foul of this legislation, and who are the first group to abuse it.”

5. The threatening events early in 2011 led to the creation of a Joint Action Group.  This Group recommended a national football policing unit.  This is not possible without a national police force.  Further,  this can be easily escalated to spying on other groups in our society.  Indeed, is this the real reason for a unified police force in Scotland?

Thought Police for hate “crimes”
As usual, wrong diagnosis has led to the wrong remedy.  Instead of naming the sin, or the crime, they invent new specialised crimes, and set up specialised police units to police these.  If the Government is truly concerned about what happens at football matches, there are other ways of handling this.  Who pays for the policing at football matches?  If the costs are passed on to the clubs then they will soon concentrate their minds on the solution.  As penalties are increasing for football clubs, they are considering other options such as spectator policing, which is less costly, more effective, and more socially acceptable than the bureaucracy of a police force trained and equipped for true criminality instead of invented ‘hate’ crimes.  In the old days, we called hate “sin” - it was not a crime.  But as sin has disappeared out of the humanist vocabulary, the vacuum needs to be filled with something else.  The thought police have arrived.

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