Scottish National Police Timewasters

I have very limited experience with the Scottish police, which is as it should be in a free society. They are invariably pleasant, polite and helpful. The police don’t stop you for no reason. They don’t come round your house or place of work without cause. If you are a law-abiding citizen, you have no reason to fear the police at all. This is what makes Scotland different from most countries.

The police do important work and I wish they were allowed to just get on with it. They have to conclude their investigation into SNP finances. The have to investigate serious crimes like fraud, theft and false accounting and their job involves not merely investigating SNP politicians, some of their time has to be devoted to crimes committed outwith the SNP.

There are only around sixteen thousand police officers, which means in some parts of rural Scotland there is not a police officer at all.

Then it’s Polis this, an’ Polis that, an’ Polis, ‘whoo’s yer soul?”
But it’s “Thin blue line of ‘eroes” when the drums begin to roll
The drums begin to roll, my boys, the drums begin to roll,
O it’s “Thin blue line of ‘eroes,” when the drums begin to roll.

Well, the drums began rolling on Monday. There were more than three thousand complaints made to our thin blue line of heroes and each of them had to be investigated.

There’s been a burglary in Achiltibuie, the nearest policeman is in Inverness. It’s been the first burglary in Achiltibuie since 1877 and unfortunately a valuable stag’s head has been stolen, but the police officers in Inverness are all investigating complaints about J.K. Rowling.

There won’t of course be three thousand complaints every day, but there will be a few hundred. It won’t be long before we discover that the police in Scotland is solving still fewer real crimes.

An organisation with sixteen thousand employees having to deal with three thousand complaints in a day will paralyse it. Worse it is already clear that none of the three thousand complaints will lead to even one person being spoken to by the police, let alone arrested, tried and convicted.

The investigation into the SNP’s finances has become like Jarndyce versus Jarndyce, it ties up ever more resources in the court of chancery, but the people who brought the case in the first place are now dead and no one involved remembers what it is was about. Something to do with an escaped jaguar living in a tent outside someone’s mother-in-law. There was a fishy smell because someone failed to switch the fridge on.

Well, if all the millions and all the resources of Police Scotland cannot solve Jarndyce versus Jarndyce how can they solve whether it is a crime if one of the numerous fake Elon Musks on X said something from who knows where that was contrary to the Scottish hate crime law?

First Police Scotland is going to have to establish that a crime has been committed. But if you are not going to prosecute J.K. Rowling you can’t prosecute someone else for saying the same. If you are not going to prosecute the President of Iran for saying on social media something horrible about Jews or if you are not going to prosecute people for displaying swastikas at a demonstration because it depends on context, then anything anyone might write could in theory be exonerated by the context.

Once you let one hate criminal on social media get away with it you are going to have to justify why you go after another for saying the same. This is the folly of having Police Scotland police social media. You cannot arrest one person for burglary if you have decided that all the others committed no crime. We cannot be arrested arbitrarily.

But if that is the case Humza Yousaf your law has already fallen apart. The only people who will rightly be prosecuted will be those who shout insults in the street or physically assault Muslims, gays, transgender people or the disabled. But those people would have been convicted anyway prior to Humza Yousaf’s law.

We all have a ready-made defence. J.K. Rowling is rich and powerful and can obtain the best lawyers, but if they try to convict me my defence lawyer will point to the fact that Police Scotland said no crime had been committed when Rowling wrote what she wrote or someone else wrote what he wrote. But we have equality of the law in Scotland, you cannot arrest someone for a crime when you say the same crime was not a crime when committed by someone else.

But this means that not only have the SNP wasted police time with Jarndyce versus Jarndyce, it has continued to waste police time by creating a law that floods the police with complaints of crimes for which no one will be arrested. Worse still this leads to the Scottish population concluding that the police are incapable of solving crimes and that law is a lot of lies and nonsense.

The police have a difficult enough job keeping us safe, convicting criminals and generally doing an excellent job fairly and moderately. The SNP has not merely wasted police time it has turned Scottish law into a laughingstock.

If we cannot convict the SNP in the courts let us at least convict it at the ballot box. Get rid of these fools before they do any more damage.

Effie Deans writes at Lily of St. Leonard’s here. To support her writing, donations are welcomed here.

This piece first appeared in Country Squire Magazine, and is reproduced by kind permission.

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