Beware Scotland’s hate crime bill

Burns, Hume, Adam Smith, and others who shone in that remarkable intellectual period in Scotland’s history, were not the cradle of the Enlightenment; but it is indisputable that they were major contributors to its emergence and influence. Now, north of the border, the Scottish government has set out to divorce us from the heritage those minds gave us: to be unafraid of, indeed willing, to discuss, probe, dispute ideas and thoughts in the liberating realm of fearless free speech.

Scots are now locked in a woke chamber: virtue signalling, pandering to perceived victimhood, punishing any who assert biological fact, placing a halter of criminality on free thought when articulated by speech, abandoning common sense. It is all there in the Scottish government’s hate crime and public order bill. From the towering height of the Enlightenment, the Scottish nation’s leaders have fallen to a low where intellectual rigour is not only an unknown concept, but can put those who practice it in the clink.