Humza Yousaf has been skewered for “hypocrisy” by furious critics after an old video of an “inflammatory speech” resurfaced in the wake of the SNP’s controversial new Scottish hate crime laws.
Opponents of the Scottish First Minister have suggested he would have been caught out by the new laws after a video from 2020 showed his participation in an anti-racism debate.
At the time, Mr Yousaf highlighted the scarcity of non-white officials in the government ranks and spoke about how, “99 percent of the time”, he was “the only non-white person” in the room during government meetings.
He said it was a “collective failure” that Black and Ethnic Minority (BAME) Britons were under-represented in Scotland, but a clip of his speech has sparked an outcry among Conservatives.
They have branded the clip, which only showed the then justice secretary listing high-ranking white officials and not the wider context, “inflammatory” and suggested it would fly foul of Scotland’s new hate crime laws.
In the clip, Mr Yousaf can be heard listing prominent Scottish officials and their races, with every individual listed as “white” following a brief introduction.
David Campbell Bannerman, chairman of the Conservative Democratic Organisation, said the First Minister “must be relieved” to have delivered the speech before his new law came into effect.
He said: “Humza Yousaf must be relieved to have given his inflammatory speech about white people early enough to not be caught by the SNP’s new law against hate crime.
“Being anti-white is just as racist as other forms of racism and is just as unacceptable.
“These SNP Nationalist Socialists are a danger to all our freedoms and are spreading anti-white and anti-English hatred through their extremism and idiocy.”
Scotland’s Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 came into effect on April 1 and makes a crime of “stirring up hatred” based on someone’s age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity or being intersex.
Communicating material or behaving in a manner a “reasonable person would consider to be threatening or abusive” while intending to stir up hatred based on the listed protected characteristics would constitute an infraction.
The maximum penalty under the law is a seven-year prison sentence, but while the bar is lower than it may have been previously under the Hate Crime Act, it has several free speech provisions.
People can defend their behaviour if they prove it was “reasonable”, and Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights protects ideas that “offend, shock or disturb”.
Siobhian Brown, Scotland’s Victims and Community Safety Minister, said: “You have to be really threatening and really abusive, and there has to be reasonable assumption from others that that is the case.”
Judging by those standards, Mr Yousaf’s speech in parliament would not fall foul of the new laws, given there were no threats lodged or abuse given.
Despite being judged as a “fairly safe piece of legislation” by Adam Tomkins, a conservative MSP turned Glasgow law professor, concerns remain about the law’s potential impacts on freedom of speech.
Express.co.uk has contacted the First Minister’s office for comment.
