Ezra Levant highlights Scotland’s new hate speech law, criticized as "draconian" by First Minister Hamza Youssef, who previously mocked white people while occupying predominantly white leadership roles. Over 1,000 complaints filed under the vague "non-crime hate incident" category—Alba Party MP Neil Hanvey and Conservative Myrdle Fraser were targeted without proof—raising fears of political suppression. The law’s bias against "gender critical views," like those of J.K. Rowling, risks stifling debates on women’s rights and child safeguarding, mirroring censorship trends in Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, and the U.S., with 68% of Scots demanding repeal. Legal battles loom as free expression faces potential criminalization unless it incites violence. [Automatically generated summary]
I talk at length with a Scottish member of parliament who was hit with their country's new hate speech censorship law.
Crazy.
And these secret complaints and something called a non-hate crime incident or something.
Just really, holy moly, is it a cautionary tale?
You're not going to want to miss this.
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All right, here's today's show.
Tonight, a feature interview with a Scottish MP, one of the first people to be hit with the new censorship law in that country.
It's April 9th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
It seems the whole world is bent on censorship.
Testing The Law's Limits00:14:42
It's really increasing.
Ireland is looking at deep censorship.
Of course, in Canada, Justin Trudeau has proposed Bill C-63, perhaps the most draconian censorship bill in the free world.
We see in Brazil, Twitter is being banned and Elon Musk criminalized by a judge who doesn't like the free speech on that platform one bit.
Well, same with Scotland.
You might recall a video I did a couple of years ago when I went through an astonishing bill championed by the first minister of that country, Hamza Youssef.
He's an unusual figure to be calling for censorship of hate speech, given this absolutely bigoted speech that he himself gave, dripping for contempt for what he called white people.
Take a look at this.
But why are we so surprised when the most senior positions in Scotland are filled almost exclusively by those who are white?
Take my portfolio alone.
The Lord President, white.
The Lord Justice Clerk, white.
Every High Court Judge, white.
The Lord Advocate, white.
The Solicitor General, white.
The Chief Constable, white.
Every Deputy Chief Constable, white.
Every Assistant Chief Constable, white.
The head of the Law Society, white.
The head of the Faculty of Advocates, white.
Every prison governor, white.
And not just Justice.
The Chief Medical Officer, white.
The Chief Nursing Officer, white.
The Chief Veterinary Officer, white.
The Chief Social Work Advisor, white.
Almost every trade union in this country headed by people who are white.
In the Scottish Government, every Director General is white.
Every chair of every public body is white.
That is not good enough.
How can someone who is so clearly driven by racial animus then pass a law that would trap others for what he considers racial animus?
Shouldn't he be the one charged under his own law?
Or preferably, shouldn't we all be allowed to have freedom of speech and shouldn't we be able to judge for ourselves what is odious and what is impermissible rather than having the police do so?
Well, that's my opinion, but that's not the law.
Hamza Yosef's censorship bill is now law in Britain.
And wouldn't you know it?
One of the first people complained about is a member of parliament.
His name is Neil Hanvey.
And let me read to you a tweet that he published last week.
So my office got a call from Police Scotland today advising me that I had been reported for a hate crime based on an undisclosed tweet.
Can you believe that?
You don't even know the case against you.
It's an undisclosed tweet.
They had assessed the complaint and were notifying me that they were taking no further action as they did not deem it necessary.
But still, a call from the police, that's a way of saying, we've got our eyes on you, buddy.
Police officers are already under enormous pressure, but now they are having to spend their precious time assessing the perceptions of how offended someone feels over others' lawfully expressed opinions.
This is utterly ridiculous, illiberal, wasteful, and unacceptable in a supposedly liberal democracy where political discourse should be free and open.
The tweet continues.
I recall when I reviewed this bill a couple of years ago that the police took the unusual step of coming out in public against it, saying that it would stress their relations with ordinary Scots.
It would lower the police's reputation in the community and divert them from more important work.
Well, joining us now via Skype from the United Kingdom is Neil Hanvey, the MP who received that phone call from police.
Mr. Hanvey, what a pleasure to have you join us.
Thanks for taking the time.
Thank you, sir.
Lovely to be with you.
I am not surprised that a political leader such as yourself was one of the first targets of the censorship bill.
But in fact, thousands of complaints have been filed in the very first week.
Am I right?
Yes, you're correct.
And referencing your earlier comments about what is commonly referred to as the white speech by Hamza Youssef in the Scottish Parliament, that received the most complaints of those many thousands of complaints.
So it's quite interesting that the architect of this legislation has actually ended up being one of the targets in its first week since launch.
But yeah, I mean, I was expecting, I wrote about the potential impact of this legislation back in October in a newspaper article setting out my concerns about how it would be used for vexatious purposes to attack political opponents or indeed anyone with whom you disagreed with.
And so it has come to pass that I was reported to Police Scotland who had to waste their precious resource assessing the complaint, contacting me to tell me that I hadn't done anything wrong and that they weren't going to take the matter any further.
However, a political opponent of mine, somebody from the Conservative Party in Scotland, Myrdle Fraser, also found out in recent weeks that he has a non-crime hate incident recorded against his name.
And so the question I have to ask is, well, what was the tweet?
You know, how was it investigated?
Who made the complaint?
And do I have a non-crime hate incident against my previously unblemished character?
That's a great question.
I'm so glad you raised it.
In Canada, we don't have such a thing as that, a non-crime hate incident.
What I think that means, correct me if I'm wrong, is that you've done something, quote, wrong, but it hasn't risen to a level where the police or the prosecutors think there's a reasonable likelihood of conviction.
But it's still on your record.
So I find this an astonishing thing for police to have at all.
It goes on your record, not your criminal record, but a record, and it implies that you're a hater.
In your case, it sounds like you still don't even know what the complaint against you was for.
That's correct.
So, the police have been challenged on these non-crime hate incidents down south in England, and they are being asked by the Home Secretary rather, to stop that practice because it's deemed to be unlawful and against human rights of citizens.
And so, the same argument should prevail in Scotland with this non-crime hate incident activity.
But there's a real possibility that members of the public could have a non-crime hate incident recorded against their name, and that could potentially impact on their employment, their current employment, or indeed any future job that they go for.
It's a really concerning issue.
And the fundamental problem with this is you mentioned that there needed to be some assessment of whether it reached a criminal threshold.
Well, that's not actually the case.
It all rests on the person who's offended's perception.
And that is the only test that is required for a non-crime hate incident to be recorded against your name.
Okay, thank you for that information.
This is an alien concept here in Canada, even though we inherited so much of our legal system from the UK.
Now, let me ask you a personal question before we get back to the law.
You said the police phoned you to say, oh, we're not proceeding.
But I mean, you're a sophisticated man, you're a member of parliament, you understand laws and police, you're confident, you have a media profile.
You're a tougher nut to crack than an ordinary Scot who probably has no interaction with police or lawyers or the court system.
And if they got such a phone call, I would suggest it would be terrifying.
Even if the official message was, don't worry, we're not coming from you now.
The subtext would be, you're on our radar, we know who you are, we know where you are, we know something about you, you better watch your P's and Q's.
So, let me ask you: do you feel like this phone call to you by the police was a kind of warning?
Or, like, I mean, what was it like?
Well, the reality was they didn't speak to me directly.
They spoke to a member of my team.
So, the message was relayed to me via a third party.
I mean, as somebody that I absolutely trust, but that in itself is not particularly great practice.
Yeah, I mean, talk about, I mean, that's a confidential matter, you would think.
But you would think they would say, may I please have an arranged conversation with Mr. Henry directly?
That's insane that they were leaking this gossipy, defamatory fact about you.
I mean, like you say, you trust this person, but that's sloppy practice, or maybe that too is deliberate.
Well, indeed, I mean, the fundamental issue with the Hate Crime Act as it stands is that the report can be made based purely on perception.
And the argument that the First Minister has advanced in recent days has been that it's important to get a sense of what kind of hate is out there.
And that's why non-crime hate incident reporting and recording of it is important because it helps tell us about the prevalence of so-called hate.
But actually, all it does is it tells us how vexatious certain parts of the population are and how many complaints they're prepared to make against an individual.
And the First Minister has found out on the back of his white speech that he can be targeted in that way also.
But there's a really important point here with the legislation.
So the criminal test is really quite high.
And there is a freedom of expression provision within the Act.
But what there isn't is a detailed explanatory note that gives people information about how that test may be made, met, and what kind of speech would not be classed as hate speech.
And that's really important for two reasons.
One, there is no carve-out for what is generally referred to as gender critical views, and that's not been clarified.
Sex is not protected characteristics within the Act, so therefore women's rights are fair game.
And those are two significant issues that I'm very concerned about personally.
And the reason that those provisions are not there, and this is my view, and the reason that the explanatory notes are not clear, is that it would take someone a very arduous process through a criminal trial to discover that what they did was not criminal and didn't meet the criminal test than what they said was covered by the freedom of expression provision.
And the reason, as I said, those clarifications were not there was because it's my belief that the Scottish Government had the very clear intention of exerting a chilling effect on the people of Scotland to stop them talking about some of the important political issues that we face, particularly around identity politics.
And that chilling effect could have been, could have been exerted very powerfully had it not been for people like myself and more prominent people like J.K. Rowling testing the law by making sure that we continue to speak freely and to challenge this regressive, illiberal legislation.
You're so right.
I've been following J.K. Rowling.
By the way, she causes reverberations even here in Canada.
In the West Coast city of Vancouver on the Pacific side of our country, a young nurse put up a billboard that just says, I heart J.K. Rowling.
And she's been prosecuted ever since for conduct unbecoming.
So J.K. Rowling is a fascinating person with such a huge platform, and she exerts herself for freedom.
I saw the other day, she tweeted that if anyone gets in trouble for, say, misgendering someone, because I think you're right.
This is about one of the things they're going to do if they're not protecting sex, but they're protecting gender identity.
Seems pretty clear to me.
This is a transgender censorship act.
J.K. Rowling said she will re-utter whatever someone who is charged with hate speech says.
She's basically saying, come and get me, pick on someone your own size.
And she's got an enormous size in terms of reputation, a following, and of course, money.
She won't be as easily picked on as an ordinary person.
No, I think what she's done is incredibly courageous and really important because she's really called out the chilling effect.
And she's made it quite clear that she will stand with anyone who is targeted by the gender ideology mob.
And, you know, this is, you know, queer theory, or I call them queer theory extremists because they are one strand of the critical social justice movement, which is an inversion of everything that they purport to stand for.
And so I think it's incredibly important that people like J.K. Rowling row in behind ordinary citizens.
And I certainly have made it absolutely clear that I will not be silenced.
I will not be stopped speaking up about child safeguarding, speaking up about women's rights and the protection of LGB people's sex-based rights, which have also been brought into this so-called LGBTQI, et cetera, movement without any sort of consideration of whether we want to participate in this nonsense or not.
Isn't that interesting?
Making a Point of Privilege00:08:50
Because, of course, you, as an elected member of parliament, have parliamentary privilege.
And what does that mean?
One of the things it means is that your speech is protected.
It's protected absolutely when you are in the chamber of the House of Commons.
That's something that we inherited from you here in Canada.
But there's also an argument to be made that what you do in the service of your constituents as an MP when you make comments on Twitter or outside the chamber, there's an argument that that would have privilege as well.
This seems to me to be an attack, not just on ordinary people, but if you yourself have been targeted and if police followed up with a bizarre communication, I wonder if you have ever given consideration to filing a point, to making a point of privilege, a privilege complaint to the Speaker of the House of Commons.
That strikes me as you would be one of a small number of people who would be able to do that because you are an MP.
Well, I mean, we do have parliamentary privilege, but parliamentary privilege is not an absolute right to say whatever you want.
Of course, you can't.
You still have to behave within the rules of parliament.
And, you know, and outside the chamber, you're not covered by some of the protections of privilege.
So you do have to be careful about what you say.
But the basic position that I've taken is that I will continue to tell the truth.
I will continue to speak clearly about my political views, my lawfully held political views about some of the thorny issues that we're dealing with.
I will continue to stand up for young people who are being subjected to the most horrific medical and surgical interventions without any proper care or consideration of their rights.
And they're accelerated onto these bast paths into transgender clinics.
And, you know, I feel that that's my absolute responsibility to speak loudly and clearly about this.
And if the police and the government deem that unlawful and they want to arrest me, then they can do that.
But that will open a Pandora's box because certainly in the last week, we've started a petition.
The Alipa Party, my party, have started a petition to repeal the Hate Crime Act.
And so far, 68% of the Scottish population agree with us.
So these laws are not popular.
I'm sure you've experienced this much more profoundly in Canada.
You've been on quite a torturous journey under Justin Trudeau over the last few years.
And, you know, and I stand in solidarity with Chris Ensign.
I've met Billboard Chris personally.
I had a good chat with him last year.
But many, many campaigners who are standing against this liberal movement, which seems to have afflicted governments across the world.
And we really must stand united to defeat this liberal movement.
Well, that's very interesting to me that you've been following what's going on in Canada.
And we know Billboard Chris well because he's the pointy edge of the spear on that issue.
Unfortunately, you're ahead of us in terms of legislation.
Justin Trudeau's proposed censorship bill is only just introduced in Parliament a few months ago.
Let me ask you one question about going back a bit to the 8,000 or so complaints that were filed right away.
You mentioned that the man who proposed this bill, the First Minister of Scotland, Hamza Youssef, had the most complaints against him.
I'm not surprised.
But here's my question to you.
Who judges whether or not a complaint will get the non-hate crime incident marking or if it'll be kicked up a notch and actually be investigated and prosecuted by police?
Is that a police decision?
Is there some hate finder general?
Is there some panel of activists?
In Canada, different hate crimes have a different answer for that.
There's something called the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, etc.
If they were to proceed against you, who would make that decision?
And I guess my follow-up question is, does that mean if Hamza Youssef appoints the hate finders that they'll never accept a complaint against him?
Maybe you can tell us a little bit about how this process works, or maybe it's still a bit of a mystery.
Well, it absolutely is a mystery.
I mean, that's one of the issues about the precision or lack of the legislation is it doesn't even mention non-crime hate incidents.
This is a matter of mystery, and it seems to rest in the hands of whoever the police officer is that is investigating your specific complaint.
And what's interesting about non-crime hate incidents and how they will or will not be recorded is that the minister responsible for the legislation, Siobhan Brown, who has done the rounds of the various different media channels in the UK since the bill was introduced, is unable to clarify any of this detail.
And there are no explanatory notes that set out how this would be recorded and what the threshold is to trigger a non-crime hate incident.
So none of that is clear.
But what has become clear is that the First Minister has stated in the media that neither he nor J.K. Rowling will have a non-crime hate incident recorded against their name.
Now, you know, that is simply a question of equity.
So if you're a first minister or the most famous author in the world and you don't have a non-crime hate incident marked against your name, then why is a member of the Scottish Parliament able to have one put against his name or indeed any other person in the country without being informed or more importantly, been able to defend themselves?
What happened to the right to a fair trial?
Well, it sounds like a prejudgment and a selective enforcement of the law.
One of the things about the rule of law is that no one is above the law, no one is below the law, and it sounds like they want to go after the easy pickings.
It's very perplexing.
Let me ask you a quick question about this non-hate crime incident, just because I'm learning about it really here.
I mean, we don't have it in Canada.
Can any member of the public access your file to see if you have a non-hate crime incident?
Or is it only other police who can?
Like if there's a black mark, is it like a credit rating at a credit bureau that people can check?
What happens if you get one of these black marks on your record?
We don't know.
We really don't know because there's not a piece of legislation that describes how this operates.
There's not a published police guideline that explains how this operates.
And it's really quite impenetrable, the system, to understand who, how, and why any such stain would be put against someone's name.
So, as part of my work in my professional life, I've always had what's called enhanced disclosure here.
In other words, you have an organization goes through any potential criminal record that you might have to give you a clean bill of health for your employment.
And I continue to have that because a relationship I have with an organization separate to my parliamentary duties.
And that came back clean as a whistle, as usual, last week.
But prior to that, following Myrtle Fraser's discovery that he had a non-crime hate incident marked against his name, I submitted what's called a subject access request, which is a request into Police Scotland asking them what data they held on me.
So that will establish if one of these non-crime hate incidents has been marked against my name previously.
But it should also uncover if the report that I posted a tweet about last week has triggered a non-crime hate incident.
But, you know, that again, you know, if more and more people who are concerned about this issue start writing into the police asking for a subject access request and which data they hold against that individual's name, then the police will be fighting on two fronts.
Comedians and Non-Crime Hate Incidents00:05:45
They'll be dealing with vexatious, thousands of vexatious complaints from people who should have something better to do with the time, frankly.
And they'll also be receiving a whole tsunami of subject access requests from people who are concerned that these queer theory activists have decided to pick on them and target them and report them to the police.
So, you know, this will just grind the whole police force to an absolute standstill.
And of course, that benefits absolutely no one.
This legislation is so ill-conceived and badly delivered, so badly drafted.
It's an absolute dog's breakfast and it needs to be repealed.
And there needs to be a fundamental question about how we moderate our language as a society, how we look after each other, but most importantly, how we tolerate and engage in free and open political and social discourse so that we can enhance society and not operate as a totalitarian or a liberal non-democracy.
I mean, I think of Scotland, I think of Braveheart, I think of freedom.
I think of people who would never allow the government to weigh their words and say that's hateful and that's done.
By the way, hate is a human emotion.
You can't ban hate just by passing a law any more than you can pass a love each other law that forces people to feel love.
It's, you know, we don't want hate to transform into violence.
Of course not.
We don't want it to transform into an actual threat.
But by the way, you are allowed to have hate in your heart.
I mean, it's not a pretty emotion, but banning a feeling is even stupider than banning words and even harder to define, I guess.
I don't know.
It just seems very unscottish to me.
Let me ask you a question about that.
If I recall the bill, I haven't read the final version that was passed, but I remember when I studied the bill a little while ago, it seemed like it had a special section to deal with playwrights and comedians.
Is that still the case?
That there's this whole section about plays, like theatrical plays.
And I thought it was very weird.
And I don't know, maybe that's not in the final draft.
What's that all about?
Well, I mean, that's a bit of a legislative hokey cokey, you know, because it was in, then it was out, and then it was in again.
And last week it was, what on earth is this all about?
And what has, you know, again, the position has shifted from the Scottish government, but yes, if you perform a piece of theatre or comedy that is deemed hateful, you're in scope for this.
for prosecution under this law.
And then they said, oh, no, no, it's not.
So again, there is absolutely no clarity.
The government ministry responsible for the legislation cannot set out the parameters under which this law comes into force.
And again, I go back to that point about the provision of freedom of expression that exists within the legislation.
The bar, the threshold to reach that is extremely high.
Michael Foran, who is a lecturer in public law at Glasgow University, set out that case really eloquently last night on GB News.
And so, you know, what the Scottish government have done is they've been very cagey with the truth.
They've used, you know, the threat that you might be prosecuted for putting on a play or telling a joke.
And that, you know, that chilling effect that they've been deliberately pursuing is really the key aim of all of this disinformation that has been allowed to pervade Scottish society.
But, you know, last week on the 1st of April, April Fool's Day, as we, I don't know if you have that here.
Yeah, we do.
Yeah, so it was the perfect day to launch a Fool's Bill, our Fool's Act.
But on that evening, there was a fantastic comedy event put on by Andrew Doyle and Comedy Unleashed in Edinburgh, effectively to celebrate this nonsense legislation and to have a great evening and tell jokes that some people might be offended by.
But that's part of comedy.
And part of comedy, the element of surprise, and sometimes the element of surprise is offensive.
But that's not hateful.
And I think we have to rediscover what it is to be human and allow ourselves the right to express ourselves freely.
As you say, as long as there's no incitement to violence, there's no deliberate attempt to target any specific group in a threatening or deliberate way, then, you know, what's the harm in speaking freely?
Yeah, you know, I heard of that comedy show, and it's impossible to tell comedy without goring some ox.
I think it was Orwell who said every joke is a little act of rebellion, a little revolution.
I think one of the reasons why comedy is disappearing is that you can't make fun of all the things that normal humans do because this is politically unacceptable.
I think that's why woke comedians are so unfunny.
Boy, you're right.
It touches on so much more in society than just political life.
It touches on all life.
Judicial Review in Scotland00:04:43
Let me ask you one last question.
You'd be very generous with your time.
I really appreciate that.
I didn't mean to keep you so long, but you've said so many interesting things.
We care about these in Canada because we are, in some way, a daughter of Scotland.
Our first prime minister was born in Scotland, and the Scottish people really helped build Canada.
But also because the themes that you're going through, the same as in Ireland, by the way, they have a censorship law, the same as Jacinda Ardern tried to push in New Zealand, the same as Joe Biden is talking about in America.
Justin Trudeau, we've already talked about him.
I see this as a global theme.
And, of course, social media.
So let me ask you this.
Is there a way that this can be legally challenged?
I see that the Free Speech Union has hired a law firm on standby to help anyone who's charged.
And I'm delighted, and by the way, I'm a member of the Free Speech Union, even though I'm over here.
But that's just stamping out fires where they break out.
In Scotland, I'm unfamiliar with your legal constitution.
Is there a way to challenge the constitutionality of this right away?
Is there a way to go to a high court and say, my lords, strike this down.
It is contrary to our basic law, our common law, our constitutional tenets.
Does that kind of thing happen in Scotland?
Yeah, well, there's two separate mechanisms that you could avail yourself of.
The first one, which is open to the Westminster Parliament, is to issue what's called the Section 35 notice, which they did on gender recognition reform legislation from the Scottish Parliament.
So that blocked that piece of legislation because it was incompatible with reserve matters to Westminster.
That was the argument that they made, and they took that to court and won.
So that's one mechanism.
And what that does is it prevents the bill from becoming law.
So it denies it royal assent, and therefore it doesn't necessarily nullify it, but it keeps it on the shelf.
Now, the Scottish Government have insisted that they will bring this forward again if a Labour government come into power in Westminster after the next general election, and they're likely to support that.
So self-ID would be delivered to Scotland with a Labour government.
The other way to deal with legislation that's unlawful, and there's been very good examples of that recently, is to fundraise and take a piece of legislation for judicial review.
And that would allow you to then challenge provisions within the legislation that you believe are incompatible with, for example, the Human Rights Act or the European Declaration or Convention on Human Rights.
And so there are mechanisms that you can use to challenge legislation for Women Scotland, which is a feminist, a fantastic feminist organisation that was established in Scotland because of the march of the Queer Theory lobby under Nicola Sturgeon.
They fundraised and they have taken pieces of legislation for judicial review and they've been successful in some and not so successful in others, but certainly on what constitutes the make-up of a board, that a male identifying as a female would count as a female member of that board.
That was struck down by the courts in Edinburgh and the Scottish Government, I think last week or the week before, it might have been the week before, had to amend their legislation to correct that anomaly because I think it's fair to say that Nicola Sturgeon has been more on a campaign of introducing queer theory legislation rather than in any way a campaign for independence for Scotland,
which is people like me incredibly frustrating because what she effectively did was use the cause of independence to gather enough support to get the members that she had in Parliament, but she's used them to repeatedly advance queer theory doctrine through various strands of legislation.
They have been successfully challenged, as I said, through a section 35 order and through judicial review.
So there are ways and means, but they're protracted, they're expensive.
And what you really want is a government that doesn't make up nonsense laws.
Yeah, very interesting.
Well, you've educated me, and I think our Canadian viewers, which is most of our viewers, will find this fascinating.
Standing Up in Scotland00:00:55
I'm glad that you're standing up in Scotland.
And, you know, I've only been to Scotland briefly, but you can feel the history just walking through Edinburgh or Glasgow or Aberdeen.
And when I think of the great Scots over the centuries, I can't imagine that they would support a law that would allow police to investigate a joke or a play or even an emotional comment.
So I wish you good luck and we'll continue to follow it.
And I know that you have a petition at albaparty.org, A-L-B-Aparty.org.
For those of our viewers who are in Scotland, of course, they should feel free to visit that and sign the petition.
And the rest of our viewers can visit it just to see what you're doing and learn more.