Scotland’s pound shop Stasi

The Scottish government’s illiberal Hate Crime and Public Order Act isn’t even being enforced yet and already Police Scotland are being accused of behaving like a pound shop Stasi. The Conservative MSP, Murdo Fraser discovered last week that police had recorded him as a perpetrator of a ‘hate incident’ without informing him or giving him a chance to defend himself.

An anonymous trans activist complained last year about a tweet in which the MSP had suggested that identifying as a non-binary was no more valid than ‘identifying as a cat’. He was not addressing any individual but responding to the Scottish government’s Non-Binary Action Plan.

The police duly logged this as a hate incident even though they found no evidence that Mr Fraser had broken the law. He only became aware it when the activist reported his ‘crime reference number’ to Holyrood’s Ethical Standards Commissioner and called for him to be found in breach of the MSPs’ Code of Conduct.