ANDREW NEIL: They've trashed the schools, the health service and the economy. Now the SNP are set to destroy free speech with 'hate crime' law that's an ORWELLIAN NIGHTMARE

Under a new law which comes into force on ­Monday, if you live in ­Scotland you risk being charged with a ‘hate crime’ for something you say anywhere, including in your own home.

Even your children will be able to report you to Police Scotland, which — from among its already over-stretched, ­lacklustre ranks — will deploy 500 ‘hate crime ­champions’ to bring the ‘haters’ to justice.

Petty crime is pretty much ignored by the Scottish police these days, but its oh-so-woke-and-weak leadership vows to ­investigate every hate incident, in keeping with its recent appetite for ­acting as the McPlod enforcement wing of the SNP.

Clearly scouring social media postings from a warm office is safer and more congenial than patrolling Glasgow’s ­Sauchiehall Street on a Friday night when the pubs are emptying out.

Those who think they’ve been slighted or ridiculed will be able to report it, ­anonymously if they wish, to more than 400 new ‘reporting centres’ spread across the country, including one in a Glasgow sex shop (seriously) and a mushroom ­farm (again, seriously).

It will be enough that someone feels what you said was hateful; they don’t have to prove that it was. In other words, if I think what you said is a hate crime, it’s a hate crime.

Even if the police decide what you said wasn’t quite hateful enough to merit being charged, you could still be logged, without your knowledge, in a police non-crime hate incident (NCHI) database, to which future prospective employers could request access.

So your career could easily be stymied simply by the recording of a crime you didn’t commit. It is, I think you must admit, quite a clever way of ensuring that only ‘right-thinking’ (i.e. liberal-Left) folks are ever appointed or promoted, especially in Scotland’s bloated, well-paid public sector.

Yes, I am aware that Monday is April 1. But, contrary to all appearances, this is no April Fool. Rather it is an all-too-real Orwellian nightmare with a ­Scottish accent, brought to us by the same people who’ve trashed Scotland’s once world-class schools, made the Scottish health service unfit for purpose, turned Scotland into the drug-related death capital of the world and run the Scottish economy into the ground.

What the SNP has already done to education, health and economic growth, it now plans to do to free speech — destroy it.

It seems the more the SNP is incapable of delivering even the basics of good government — turning Scotland into a social and economic backwater in the ­process — the more it insists in sticking its nose into areas of life where it has no business and no proper purpose.

Its modus operandi after 17 wasted years in power — wasted chasing the pipe dream of ­independence while making a hash of everything that improves the quality of life for ordinary Scots — is to give up on problems it’s incapable of solving and invent new, peripheral ones, such as the idea that Scotland is a cesspit of hatred. The new Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 is entirely unnecessary — the ­product of a collectivist political culture which thinks government has the right, nay the duty, to intrude into every aspect of life.

Scotland already has laws which deal with hate speech and ­threatening or abusive behaviour, which is only right. But from ­Monday, the offence of stirring up hatred will be explicitly extended to disability, religion, sexual ­orientation, age and, of course, transgender identification. It is the equivalent of a modern, ­secular blasphemy law for the wokerati.

Joanna Cherry KC, an astute SNP MP, who has fallen out with her party establishment, warns it will be weaponised by trans-rights activists to silence and even criminalise their critics.

It’s already happening. The redoubtable J.K. Rowling, in the vanguard of defending feminist rights against the trans onslaught, has already been warned by ­activist lawyers that many of her previous tweets ‘most likely ­contravene the new law’ and she should ‘start deleting’ them. Of course, she will do no such thing.

Just how much free speech will be curtailed depends on how the police implement the new law. There are no grounds for ­optimism. It was passed in 2021, but delayed from becoming law for three years to work out how it could be implemented (there’s a definition of bad legislation, if ever there was one).

Police guidance has not been made public. All we know is that, after three years, there’s only a two-hour online course for ­officers which the Scottish Police Federation has said is ‘not fit for purpose’ and a ‘recipe for disaster’.

The Association of Scottish Police Superintendents, which represents many of the country’s most senior police officers, warns that an ‘activist fringe’ will ‘weaponise’ (that word again) the new law to advance their agendas and that Police Scotland will be ‘swamped’ by spurious claims.

The police in England have been wisely advised to ignore ­tedious Twitter spats. No such guidance has been given to the Scottish police.

The English High Court ruled in 2021 that the approach to hate speech that will be the law of the land in Scotland from Monday would have a ‘chilling effect on freedom of expression’. The ­Scottish courts, often in thrall to the SNP, have had nothing to say.

But actors and playwrights have been warned by the police that ‘performing a play’ could constitute a breach of the law if it contained hate speech; and ­novelist Val McDermid, hitherto a Nicola ­Sturgeon cheerleader (like most of Scotland’s pseudo-­cultural class), has warned the new law could even cover what fictitious ­characters in a book say. The Edinburgh Festival may soon have to consider moving to Berwick.

The new law will unleash whole platoons of the zealous woke, who will patrol social media with the sole purpose of finding ­something hateful about which they can then rush to complain to one of these 400 reporting centres.

Innocent people could find themselves facing criminal charges for merely expressing an honest opinion. Scots women have already been arrested for putting up stickers calling for ­single-sex prisons.

A Tory member of the Scottish parliament discovered he had been logged (secretly) on the police database for a ‘hate ­incident’ just for questioning ­gender self-identification. His anonymous accuser turned out to be a trans activist.

A country which has already been turned into a grievance-mongering machine by the SNP (it’s always Westminster’s fault, even the rain and midges) will be fertile territory for what’s being designated a Clype’s Charter (‘clype’ being a good Scots word for snitch).

Mark carefully the words of what constitutes a hate crime: ‘any crime which is perceived by the victim or any other person to be motivated, wholly or in part, by malice, ill will or prejudice towards a person or social group’. Hard to think of a more ­comprehensive definition of a Clype’s Charter.

Scotland’s first minister, the hapless Humza Yousaf, is fully complicit in all this. He has just ­finished his first year in office. His only distinction, so far, is to be the only SNP first minister not to have been arrested.

He was justice minister when Sturgeon put her weight behind a new hate crime law. He remains committed to it, claiming (wrongly) that there is a high bar before anyone can be prosecuted, when it seems that words need only be ‘painful’ to the ‘victim’ for people to be charged, not just ‘hateful’.

He also promised to lead a wide consultation process before implementation. Instead, he retreated to his Bute House bunker. No wonder there is a growing mood even in the SNP to dump him.

But the damage has already been done. It is a tragedy of ­historic proportions for Scotland. In the second half of the 18th ­century — when new ideas of ­freedom, democracy and human rights were taking root across Europe and the American ­colonies — ­Scotland was the crucible of the British Enlightenment.

Oxford and Cambridge were then intellectual backwaters, while the universities of Glasgow (Adam Smith) and Edinburgh (David Hume) led the way in spearheading Britain’s contribution to the new Age of Enlightenment.

On Monday, Scotland enters a new Dark Age. It is entirely unnecessary and wholly self-inflicted. It will add intellectual decline to the country’s social and economic decline, which are gathering pace.

It will not be easily reversed. The Labour Party, which looks set to replace the SNP as the dominant party in both Holyrood and Westminster, voted for the SNP’s new hate crime laws.

Both are part of a lumpen ­collectivist consensus which has dominated Scottish politics for decades. Scots will have only themselves to blame for their country’s continued decline towards irrelevance as long as they continue to vote in such large numbers for these ­censorious clowns.