Almost £400,000 of taxpayer cash spent on promoting SNP’s hate crime laws
Almost £400,000 in taxpayers’ money was spent on promoting the SNP’s new hate crime laws.
The advertising campaign, which focused on the hurt feelings words could cause, urged Scottish people to make complaints to police about “hate”.
The new law is widely seen to have backfired after Police Scotland was swamped with more than 7,000 complaints in the first week of the laws coming into force, with fewer than four per cent assessed as being actual crimes.
The figures do not include the costs of creating the force’s widely mocked “hate monster” character, a separate campaign in which it was claimed that white, working-class men between 18 and 30 were more likely to commit hate offences.
The Scottish Government spent £389,689 on its Hate Hurts campaign, which ran over 21 days last month in the run-up to the laws coming into force on April Fool’s Day.
The campaign included posters and a TV advert in which the lead character said: “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words make me feel hated just for being me.” It added that words could “cause wounds that never heal”.
It urged Scots to report any hate crimes but did not explain the scope of the legislation, which includes protections for freedom of speech.
“The huge sum of public money lavished by the SNP on promoting Humza Yousaf’s shambolic hate crime law will rightly stick in the craw of Scotland’s police officers,” said Sharon Dowey, the deputy justice spokesman for the Scottish Tories.
“Police Scotland could desperately use that £400,000 as they plough through the mountain of extra work generated by SNP ministers encouraging the public to report incidents – and which we’re told is leading to a huge overtime bill.
“It also makes a mockery of SNP ministers’ apparent shock at the number of vexatious complaints being made to police.
“They ran a nationwide publicity drive, at taxpayers’ expense, urging people to report hate incidents to the police, and now have the cheek to wring their hands at the volume of them.
“The SNP’s flawed law, which was inexplicably supported by Labour and the Liberal Democrats, is unravelling just as legal experts and the Scottish Conservatives predicted. It must be ditched now.”
The Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act, which was passed by MSPs in March 2021, creates a new offence of stirring up hatred against protected characteristics including age, disability, religion, sexual orientation and gender identity.
Police officers have said members of the public have used the new laws to swamp them with vexatious complaints, often to fuel personal or political vendettas.
Critics have claimed the police and SNP government misled the public ahead of the introduction of the laws by suggesting any unkind remarks directed at protected groups would become criminal.
David Kennedy, general secretary of the Scottish Police Federation, said: “That £400,000 would have been better spent being given to Police Scotland. It could have funded better training packages and it could have helped pay for overtime. To spend £400,000 on this and give nothing to Police Scotland is ironic.”
The Scottish Government has been approached for comment.
