Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 09 September 2020
I am not sure that we did know that. We do not know exactly how many submissions there are yet because of the sheer volume of them. I understand that a number of the individual ones might be collated because they say similar things, so we do not know the exact volume of responses that we will be dealing with.
My point, which I will make more fully later, is that with such a heavy focus on part 2 of the bill, there is a serious danger that we will not do justice to the other parts of bill, or ensure that they receive effective scrutiny. I listened to the cabinet secretary on “Good Morning Scotland” this morning, when, perhaps inadvertently, he made my point for me. He was interrogated about the bill and ended up spending most of the time, for understandable reasons, talking about the chilling effect of the stirring-up offences in part 2. Later, I will make the point that that is a real risk that arises from the bill.
Given the context that I have set out—the burden on the committee—that weighs heavily on my mind, as I consider the bill. In the programme for government, the First Minister told us that
“we need to ensure that we have laws in this country that are capable of tackling hate crime because it is pernicious and horrible and we should have zero tolerance for it.”—[Official Report, 1 September 2020; c 46.]
She is right, so we must do all that we can to ensure that part 1, which deals with statutory aggravations, is not only
“capable of tackling hate crime”
but does so completely and unambiguously. That means subjecting the bill to intense scrutiny.
We need to ask whether simply consolidating is the right approach, and whether there would be merit in adopting the approach that has been adopted in New Zealand and Canada, which is concerned with forms of hatred that are based on any differences in characteristics.
We need to ask about the exclusion of sex. It is worth exploring the suggestion that that exclusion could be seen as sending the message that sex-based hatred is of less importance than that which is based on the other characteristics.
We need to ask whether the working group to consider an offence of misogynistic harassment is the best way to proceed on that because, for example, the Law Society of Scotland says that
“if the policy intention is for the list of characteristics to mirror those in the Equality Act 2010, there
is merit in including
”sex at this stage”,
and also to ask whether issues of misogyny and, indeed, misandry are too important to be left to secondary legislation. It has been suggested that substantive changes to criminal law must be included in primary legislation, through which the policy intentions can be fully and publicly debated.