Ally McCoist Has Unwittingly Made The Case In Favour Of The Hate Crime Legislation.

In any major public debate, the biggest risk to one side’s argument has always been that some over-emotional fool will blunder into it, ostensibly on your side, and instead of helping you win, will succeed only in proving the other side’s case for them.

This morning’s “intervention” from Ally McCoist, which essentially agrees with my own contention that the Hate Crime bill which has just passed into law belongs in the bin, is so crass, offensive and appalling that it has, in the space of a few hours, almost flipped my position on this entirely. It’s actually astonishing how clearly, and fully, he has set out not only the case in favour of such a law, but actually shone a clear light on why it might even be necessary.

For the record, and before I go any further, I haven’t changed my mind. This law is an appalling piece of legislative over-reach which contains too many dangerous clauses for me ever to feel that it can be justified. But that doesn’t mean that there are not elements of it with the potential to make this country a better place somewhere down the line.

This, of course, is not a new idea. What lies at the heart of all civil rights law is that first you make certain types of discrimination illegal, you force this generation to conform, and the next generation will grow up in a newly normalised reality where even the very idea of whatever you have outlawed seems absurd and backward.

It doesn’t always work. The resurgence of bigotry in the US and the Republican Party anointing a white nationalist as their candidate for President proves it. But I say that it’s better to try and to fail than to fail to try and you never know, if Biden wins re-election maybe America’s crisis passes and they get to restart the clock and make progress again.

In Scotland we’ve failed precisely because we’ve never tried, and so whilst I think that this is a draconian law which seeks to restrict free expression, I understand the principle aims of anti-discrimination legislation like this and only mourn that we still need stuff like this from time to time because there are some people who just won’t toe the line.

Here’s what’s especially disgusting about what McCoist said today; he doesn’t even realise that his remarks were wrong. A law now exists to punish behaviour that Scottish society itself should have deemed utterly unacceptable and beyond the pale long before this.

He’s incapable of recognising what he’s endorsed here because he’s never tried to think about it any differently, and the reason he’s never tried to think about it that way is that he and millions of other people in this country have normalised the kind of behaviour which has just been made criminal.

You know why I said, when I wrote about this last week, that I would respect this law and be wary but that I wouldn’t be afraid of it? I wrote that because I know for a fact that none of what I write or post, that none of the thoughts that go through my mind, put me on the wrong side of this new law. I am not a bigot of any shade or stripe.

Follow Follow published its own guidelines to its members just yesterday on this, and let me take a minute to applaud them for having done so, although it was out of necessity as much as anything else. But their “rule of thumb” is that you don’t post anything that you wouldn’t be willing to say to a uniformed cop. That’s a pretty good line to take. Those who obey that rule should be more or less fine and never need to concern themselves about it.

But read again the words that Ally McCoist said today on the radio;

“We’ve got a hate bill by the way; a hate bill has been passed in the country. And I guarantee you, next Sunday at Ibrox, I along with 48,000 will be committing a breach of that hate bill in the particular game we are all going to. It is madness.”

The condemnation has started, from the politicians at the moment, but his bosses need to take a good look at those comments and decide if they are appropriate.

Because it’s worth, for a moment, taking a look at the questions he’s been asked online.

Steven Bonnar, SNP MP for Coatbridge, slammed him; “Perhaps he can enlighten us on which protected group it is he intends to target at the upcoming Glasgow Derby? On a day when everyone connected to the game in Scotland should be working to ensure the focus is firmly on what happens on the park, his comments are completely offside.”

Former councillor Mhari Hunter asked, “I’d like someone to ask him specifically what crime he thinks he is likely to commit. Threatening and abusive behaviour? Vandalism? Assault? These are the main types of hate crimes.”

She must know that one of the crimes in this new law is the explicit crime of incitement; a plain text reading strongly suggests to me that he’s not only talking about breaking it on Sunday but that he already has … and although I’m not a lawyer it seems obvious that, at the very least, he should have some questions to answer for those remarks.

We don’t need a formal law in this country to know that the things he’s talking about need eradicating from the game and society. He’s supposed to be an intelligent guy; why doesn’t he know that already? Forget the law, forget the legal process, what ever happened to right and wrong? Where does he stand on that?

It seems pretty clear to me that stuff such as that is wrong, whether it’s legal or not, which is why I personally don’t feel I have anything to worry about.

But if you are seriously worried that your conduct, right now, puts you or others in your cohort, on the wrong side of this law then you, to be perfectly blunt, have it coming and you’re probably a piece of shit who had already left the path of decency and restraint a long time ago.

I cannot put it more plainly than that, and all McCoist has done here in identify himself as someone who feels a level of genuine fear about this is highlight how backward and even repellent some of his own opinions are, and the people in Scotland who do care about this issue should be asking him the questions those SNP members already have and a few more besides.

This has been going on so long now that it makes you want to vomit. The guy in the picture with him, another guy Scottish football feted for too damned long, would have been charged with breaking that law himself. When he was caught he was the National Coach, and he kept his job.

This is why some people think we need this law.

It’s why even more of us think that the SFA is rotten to the core and the media which is supposed to be the gatekeeper of decency and even-handedness is a disgrace.

And here’s the main thing; if he really believes that Scotland doesn’t need hate crime legislation then perhaps he should sit down and shut up and let the people who do have genuine objections to this on the basis of its illiberalism do the talking.

Because all he’s done today is advertise himself as being someone who holds the very sort of views which have brought us here, and an argument for removing people with those views from the mainstream is the sort of one that could easily swing me on this issue and get me right behind the new law.

I am tired of living in a country which normalises these attitudes. I am tired of a gutless hypocritical media which refuses to take it seriously. McCoist’s comments are right out of the gutter, and it’s high time that everyone who expresses such sentiments were treated that way.

If this wasn’t Catholics, and Irish Catholics in particular, they already would be and we wouldn’t have needed a new law to get there.

That’s why we call it Scotland’s Shame.