Hate Crime Legislation Has Arrived. Celtic Fans Should Be Wary. Others Should Be Afraid.

Last week, I wrote a piece on the imminent dawning of hate crime legislation in Scotland. Today, on 1 April, it has come into being. I do not like this law. It is not just illiberal, it is, in fact, downright dangerous. I cannot understand the Scottish Parliament at times. It seems to think that this kind of guff is a substitute for improving life across this country.

This doesn’t improve anything. It allows a lot of curtain twitching liberals to feel like they have. But in fact, this is regressive and stupid.

This is exactly the kind of thing the right loves, because it provides them with a target to shoot at in the culture wars. It’s the kind of thing a lot on the left love because it assuages their consciences. I do not intend to give them any benefit of the doubt; rather than stand against this, Labour’s only gripe was that it didn’t add misogyny to the list of offences.

You know why Labour’s front bench supports this? Because with Starmer dragging them so far to the right they don’t have a policy prescription for solving any of the real issues which face Scotland and its voters. This makes them feel better about putting their names to his coming manifesto. It is contemptable. This is a nonsense of a law.

I said in my piece last week that I will not fear this law, but I will be wary of it. I don’t think I even need to be that vigilant, but I will be anyway, knowing it’s here. Mostly, I’ll watch to see what kind of ridiculous cases it conjures up and hope that some of it is daft enough to get it chucked in the bin, once it becomes obvious, even to Labour, how bad it really is.

The fact that the police have an obligation to investigate every single complaint is clearly preposterous. The politicians who proposed it and voted for it should all have to chip in and give them a hand doing so. As if Police Scotland doesn’t have enough to do, and especially when it has announced that it is deprioritising what it calls “low level crime”.

Celtic supporters in general do have to be wary of this law.

The average fan probably has more to worry about it than I do, and I’m a blogger. But it’s precisely because I’m a blogger, and know the terrain, and have essentially been working in this field for a decade and have had to think long and hard about libel, about incitement and about the limits of free speech that I feel pretty calm about this. I do have some grasp on where this law and my work might overlap, to my detriment. I’m careful because I’m used to it.

But if you post on social media, and especially on a forum, you need to be much more attuned to this than I do. You might be more inclined to stray into dangerous territory than me, and it’s something you are well advised to think long and hard about.

I moderate the comments on this site. I can only think of a handful of posts which might – just might – have crossed the line. I’ll continue to moderate them to make sure that nothing does. But that’s my biggest concern, that would be my biggest worry here.

Let me be honest though; I do hope this law eradicates certain things from our support permanently. I’ll give you an example; the On The One Road “soon there’ll be no Protestants at all” add-on, which is a disgraceful stain on us and which falls squarely within the aegis of this legislation and so it should. That’s an ethnic cleansing sentiment, it has never been anything else, and I would not cry for a single person who was hauled into court on account of it.

It is one of the few things I occasionally hear from our fans where I genuinely feel my blood boiling. How can those who sing that be so stupid, ignorant and bigoted? Get it gone. Get it gone for good, since those who chant it appear incapable of recognising what they are. For all that, I’m pretty confident that only a handful of our fans truly have to worry. There are people who should be much more concerned than the majority of us have to be.

Or rather, there are Peepul who should be much more concerned than us. That element of the Ibrox fan-base which hates, reflexively, which sings its sectarian bile, whose loathing of the country they live in, whose conspiracy theories taint the oxygen supply … if you’ve spent ten minutes on their forums you know there are people there who should be scared witless by this law because it’s going to completely change the way they interact with the world.

There is so much content on those forums which will not simply hit the tripwires of this legislation but will boldly rip through them and right into the minefield. The people running those forums know this full well; for them, this is the raw material of their nightmares. The thing is, they’ve had years to drain the swamp, and it’s been allowed to bubble away.

The music in their stands would change, radically, too if this law was to be applied in its full and proper manner. The songs their fans sing on a regular basis are amongst the most horrific permitted in any football stand right across Europe.

It is blatantly obvious that some of their songs and chants violate the new law so clearly that it shouldn’t even need pointing out. If you know that the law targets “incitement”, for instance, you know that it will be hard to argue that “we’re up to our knees in fenian blood, surrender or you’ll die” can be anything else. You could lock that stadium up and charge tens of thousands of them every single week … and if we’re to take this seriously they’ll need to.

All of us will have to be careful, of course, a little or a lot depending on the kind of stuff we’re involved in … but I think a lot of their fans are in serious peril as a result of this, and if I owned or ran one of their sites, I would be having sleepless night.