A new Scottish Government campaign is appearing on billboards across the land. Six short patronising messages are respectively addressed to ‘Dear Haters’, ‘Dear Bigots’, ‘Dear Disabilists’, ‘Dear Homophobes’, ‘Dear Racists’ and ‘Dear Transphobes’ . (I wouldn’t have been surprised if there had been one addressed to ‘Dear White Men’, but I guess they couldn’t be quite so blatant without giving the game away.)
The messages are, of course, standard Cultural Marxist identity politics. The people of Scotland are carved up into a number of oppressed groups and implicitly an equal number of oppressor groups.
For example, one of these banal billboard messages reads: ‘Dear Bigots, you can’t spread your religious hate here. End of sermon. Yours, Scotland.’ This message is, of course, aimed at the sectarian divide between Protestants and Catholics, principally in and around Glasgow. The wording would suggest that the writer sees the Protestants as the oppressors and the Catholics as the victims. Hardly the best way to bridge the divide. (I have also seen longer versions of the messages online, but the content is no better.)
One of the most concerning aspects of this campaign is that the messages carry not only the logo of the Scottish government, but also the logo of Police Scotland. It is of the essence of policing under the rule of law that the police enforce the law impartially. It is clearly impossible for Police Scotland to do this when they are endorsing a Cultural Marxist campaign which divides the public into groups of supposed victims and oppressors.
It is not just in theory that this approach is wrong. It can have the most horrific consequences in practice. The grooming gang scandals in English towns and cities were possible only because prior anti-racism campaigns had effectively made certain ethnic minorities untouchable. Police and social workers knew that raising the issue was likely to be career-destroying, so the vast majority of them said and did nothing year after year. Remember that the Rotherham scandal alone accumulated 1,400 young victims of racist gendered violence i.e. gang rape and forced prostitution.
The equalities agenda has also led to police officers forgetting their duty to investigate impartially, instead adopting a ‘believe the victim’ approach with often appalling results. For example, on the say-so of the fantasist known as ‘Nick’ several highly reputable men including a retired field marshal were subject to humiliating heavy-handed dawn raids on their homes and had their reputations dragged through the mud.
This type of identity politics also leads to a mis-focusing of policing towards the internet and away from real crimes which hurt people. For example, in London increasing resources have been spent on monitoring the internet while the metropolis becomes notorious for stabbings, shootings and acid attacks.
Related to this focus on the internet is the obsession of police forces with non-crime ‘hate incidents’. The objection that the test of what qualifies as a hate crime or hate incident is subjective is well known. A deeper objection is that in policing the internet the police are drawn in to acting as moral arbiters.
The same objection can be made more broadly about the Scottish government. Ever since the dawn of Christianity there has been a fundamental distinction between the state and the Church, and between the law of the land and God’s moral law. Indeed, Jesus himself said: ‘Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.’ All governments that pursue the ironically named ‘equalities’ agenda reject that essential foundation of Western civilisation.
The approach of this campaign is a classic case of the fallacy known as poisoning the well. Marxists are past masters at this type of manipulation. The message is framed in such a way that anyone who opposes it is identifying him or herself as a hater, a bigot, a racist, etc.
Even so, it is vital that we explicitly oppose this campaign and others like it. We must remind people that a free society is possible only where Church and state are separate and where the state is not the moral arbiter. We must call out the Scottish government for its cynical divide-and-rule approach and put the case for the only genuine kind of equality – equality before the law.
