Resist the Hate Crime Act and Campaign for its Repeal
Police Scotland will translate itself from a Service into a Force for one particular purpose, the pursuit of people who speak their minds.
Humza Yousaf’s Hate Crime Act inflicts a deep wound on the face of Scottish society. Today, on their own admission Police Scotland will translate itself from a Service into a Force for one particular purpose, the pursuit of people who speak their minds. How has Scotland, the seat of the Enlightenment, come to this?
The first malign product of this Act beggars belief. Police Scotland has invented a new class of “pre-determined” criminals, young working class men from our deprived communities, who are now its primary targets for arrest: “We know young men aged 18-30 are more likely to commit hate crime, particularly those from socially excluded communities who are heavily influenced by their peers.” Young people whom our economic system has condemned to live in deprivation, who have been failed by our education system, are now to pay an extra price, criminal conviction, so that the virtue signallers in Holyrood can feel good about themselves.
There are only two ways a citizen can respond to this Act. Zip the mind, zip the lips and self-censor, or continue to speak out on any subject we wish, and campaign for its repeal.
Self-censorship is born of the fear of government and police. Self-censorship is cowardice, and no people with any pride in their heritage and democratic values should engage in it. The answer to this Act is to resist, by refusing to change the way we think, speak, and write; and if any one person is signalled out for prosecution, let us all repeat what is said and thus by mass action render this piece of pernicious legislation null and void.
The speech below, which I have deliberately chosen to re-publish as a challenge to the Act, is one that some will find offensive. It might surprise them to know that being offensive is not a one-way stream. I find their attempts, which are well documented, to silence and intimidate those who disagree with them equally offensive. Being offended goes with the freedom that comes with free speech, the foundation of democracy.
Scottish Union for Education
Dundee Conference
12.4.23
Gate Church International Coffee Bar 6.30pm
Speakers:
Dr. Jenny Chapman, Paediatrician
Maggie Melon, Social Worker
Ewan Gurr, Columnist
Jim Sillars, Former MP and Deputy Leader SNP
Speech by Jim Sillars
I do not bring to this subject the expertise of the others on this platform.
I am a politician whose main interest is international affairs and the development of geopolitical changes now underway, and how these will affect relations between states. Although this meeting’s subject is about policies being applied to Scottish schools, I want to explain how I see it in a wider Western and world context, as well as in our own nation.
That so many in the Western world lack the courage to uphold a biological truth and so label properly Trans ideology as a lie, and are prepared to stand aside while children in schools are fed that lie, is one manifestation of a much wider malaise, eating away at what was previously our great strength – freedom of thought articulated in freedom of speech, which in turn gifted us with the intellectual instrument of rigorous interrogation of public policy, in a social sphere where tolerance and a willingness to be offended was normal.
When a lie about biology is punted as truth, and taught as such, it destroys the magic of childhood, subverts the adolescent, and carries a long term price: inflicting on Western society, through our children as they become citizens, the fatal weakness that comes from the hollowing out of character, at precisely the time when strength of character, and ability to address harsh realities, will be called for. There is a warning in the words of the Columbian Philosopher Nicolas Gomez Davilla - “Each civilisation dies from indifference towards the unique values which created it.”
Governments in a democracy promote education for two principle reasons.
One is moral, that it is in the interests of a child to be enabled to read, write, have an extensive vocabulary so that he or she can communicate intelligently with others, to stimulate a thirst for knowledge and understanding as a means by which all can exercise autonomy, and are fit to govern themselves in concert with their peers. That is where parental interest comes in.
Second: it is essential for the continued existence of the state that its people are a match for others in other states in their ability to be innovative, productive, competitive, and able to create wealth in order that the state’s public responsibilities can be met.
Those principles are paramount for Western societies at a time when great geopolitical changes are taking place. The rise and rise of Asia, where the dynamic energy of peoples, released from a past that constrained their development, is a challenge to the West in both economic and political terms for the first time in hundreds of years. Africa too is going to join in that challenge.
How Asia, Africa and the West accommodate the legitimate interests of each, how the world economically and politically adjusts to a new balance, is the conundrum which our children will have to solve in the years ahead of them. In that world to come they will face tough decisions, and they need to be armed with a strong collective strength of character, an ability to apply robust thinking, face uncomfortable facts, and find a way through a maze of political, philosophical, ideological paths of a complexity that previous generations, who took Western hegemony for granted, could not imagine.
Does anyone who is rational, and has even a tiny inkling of the world now entering one of its great epochal transformations, believe that deflecting our young children and their older brothers and sisters, into the swamp of Trans ideology, and promoting it as if equal in value to science, maths, reading, writing and thinking critically, is preparing them for the world they will have to make their living in?
Too many people who should know better, in schools, universities, business and government have caved in to a minority in a trans community with a large megaphone, with some in the highest of places asking us to accept the absurd proposition that it is difficult to define a woman – a human being easy to define, as one with XX Chromosomes, a Cervix, a womb, with a quite distinctive body mass, who has unique bodily functions and faces medical conditions not applicable to those other humans with XY Chromosomes.
There is nothing in that Chromosome difference that bars female loving female, or male loving male, or female loving male, or a male loving a female. But there is no legislation that can make the XX become XY or vice versa, or convert them into a third variety.
We have descended in the public sphere to what can only described objectively as a level of nonsense. Precious minutes and hours that should be devoted to the true purpose of education, are being spent on indoctrination by a tiny minority, who know not, or care, what damage they are doing. It is time the adults come out of the closet they are hiding in, assert common sense, and ensure we are giving our children the education they need, based on the solid foundation that biology does not lie.
If we in the West keep denying that truth, while Asia’s growing middle classes invest in real education as the means by which their children will be superbly equipped in the competitive economic stakes, then it will be no contest, with Scots and others falling behind and getting poorer. That need not happen, but we have to will it otherwise.
One of the great legacies of Scottish history is the Enlightenment. That too should be the legacy of today’s young people. Enlightenment and truth are partners. Enlightenment dies in the deep shadow of a lie. That is no place on which to lay down the heads and minds of our children.
