Poll: half of Scots want Hate Crime Act repealed

Back to Scotland, where hapless Humza Yousaf is still managing to cause the Scottish National Party problems even after his resignation. It’s been over a month since Yousaf’s controversial Hate Crime Act came into force — and it still isn’t going down particularly well with the people of Scotland, to put things mildly. It now transpires that almost half of all Scots would rather it be repealed, according to a new Savanta poll for the Scotsman. Talk about a flop…

The rather revealing survey, which polled 1,080 Scots between May 3-8, found that 49 percent of Scots thought the new law should be repealed. Only 36 percent felt it should remain in place, while 15 percent didn’t know one way or the other. Cockburn notes a generational split in the results, with two-thirds of older people more likely to call for the law to be abolished while only a third of those between sixteen and thirty-four years old thought the same. Rather interestingly, the polling showed a gender split too, with men a little more likely to be in favor of repealing the Act than women, by 56 percent to 43. Three-quarters of 2019 Tory voters thought the law should be scrapped while just under half of all Labour voters agreed — and even as many as 41 percent of SNP voters felt it should be trashed. Not like the Nats to be out of touch with the rest of the country…

Within the first month of the Hate Crime Act being enforced, almost 10,000 reports were made — yet only 1,000 have been recorded by Police Scotland. The Scottish Police Federation has long warned the new law would waste time and resources, with fears the additional work will push the police to “breaking point” after the force already had to cut back on investigating minor crimes at the start of the year. Meanwhile, women’s rights groups and campaigners like J.K. Rowling have expressed fears that the expansion of protected characteristics to include “transgender identity” and not “sex” means that one side of the trans debate could be unfairly targeted. And, to add insult to injury, Cockburn highlighted last month that the Scottish government had spent, er, £400,000 of taxpayer’s cash on an information campaign for the new law. Crikey.

Will the public’s low opinion of the law persuade the SNP to repeal it? Don’t expect John Swinney’s “continuity cabinet” to have that much sense…

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.