"THE Hate Crime Bill,” says the Scottish Government’s own description on its website, “seeks to modernise, consolidate and extend existing hate crime law ensuring it is fit for the 21st Century.”

This isn’t just about a law that has been characterised as dangerous and deficient by everyone from the Scottish Police Federation to the crime writer Val McDermid, and united the Roman Catholic Church and the National Secular Society.

The things that ought to prompt serious discussion aren’t only the minutiae, though claims from some quarters that this bill will outlaw everything from the Bible to Shakespeare certainly suggest it might be worth taking a closer squint at the wording. It’s the underlying attitude expressed in that declaration of the Bill’s intent: the degree to which we can and should “modernise”.

That turns out to be an extremely thorny issue, even when almost everyone is clear about which side they’re on, and is not unique to this particular piece of legislation, either.

It’s something which has cropped up constantly over the past months and years, often in connection with movements and sentiments of which we may wholeheartedly approve, or at least feel are generally on the side of the angels.

It’s present in issues such as the clash between transgender activists and feminists who assert the importance of biological sex, in debates about cultural appropriation, white privilege, “cancel culture” and “no-platforming”, and in cases such as the BBC’s recent apology for the use of the “N” word in a news bulletin – which had featured it (with a warning) precisely to draw attention to the racial nature of the incident being reported.

With words, as Humpty Dumpty put it, the question is who is to be master. That seems to be the prevailing view now among those with radically progressive views; though they may describe themselves as liberals, it frequently results in highly illiberal positions on what they will allow to be said.

That’s not a complaint about the condemnation and growing rarity in ordinary discourse of words, of which the BBC’s “N” word is the shining example, that were always designed as slurs. But even there, a knee-jerk assumption that there are absolutely no circumstances that justify their use looks shaky: a film such as the late Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning owes its effect to portraying such hatred, and hateful speech. (During its filming, Gene Hackman was asked by a local storekeeper if he was in “that n***** movie they’re making”.)

But if you want to confine an attitude or a word to history, you really need to know it’s in the history. That was part of the original project of modernism, after all, when, well over a century ago, it repurposed classical allusions for the early 20th century. Postmodernism, a movement so rooted in irony and relativism that it could define itself only in terms of what had just gone before, made it more difficult to justify any position (how can you, if you deny the existence of objective truth?) except in terms of faith. Like too many faiths, their descendants among the radical progressives substitute certainty in their own rectitude for argument.

Recognising historical use, including the literary historical use, of such abusive terms, and even occasionally employing them in drama or fiction may actually help to emphasise their unacceptability. There is, though, no dispute that such words were always meant as slurs, even if members of the groups at whom they were directed have sometimes employed them (including the “N” word) on their own terms.

That raises a slightly different argument about “ownership”: the word “queer”, aside from its ordinary use as a synonym for “odd”, was used as abuse directed at homosexuals, but then reclaimed (from the 1960s) first by them, and (since the late 1980s, and increasingly) then as a neutral or even militantly favourable term — notably in academic discourse and the indefinitely expanding alphabet following LGBT.

That’s a situation where, except during the transition periods, there’s a generally accepted use that can be seen as dismissive or assertive, either from the prevailing attitude of the age or the sympathies of the user. It’s not that long since newspapers regularly ran letters complaining about the “misuse” of the word “gay” (from people who, inconsistently, never complained about the misuse of the words “queer” or “pansy”).

The most problematic instances are not where there is consensus that a term was always demeaning and should never be used in decent society (which need not mean eradicating it from history or fiction, but does insist on context). Nor are they when a word (such as gay) has finally settled down with a primary, and neutral, meaning. Words change all the time: nice, at different times, meant foolish, precise or affected before it got its current definition.

It’s when they change with a rapidity with which no one but those invested in their use for their own agenda, even if it’s an admirable one, can keep up with. It’s difficult to see why “coloured people” is an inherently offensive phrase, but “people of colour” is the preferred and only acceptable one.

In an ideal world, if those affected had strong views on one rather than another, it would be polite to follow it, even if there seemed no very clear reason why. But there seems to be a mood now that these are means of policing; worse, that the language that is deemed correct or offensive should regularly be redefined, the more easily to trip up and identify the impure.

There are interesting arguments and valid points worth debating behind the notion of “white privilege”; there’s little of either in simply yelling “check your privilege” at anyone advancing a view with which you disagree. Failing to put “hetero-” or “cis-” in front of everyday words is not evidence of hatred of gay or transgender people.

But if you insist on the importance and power of words in such contexts, it seems reasonable that legislation shouldn’t brand people as criminal bigots for failing to follow the latest fashion on whether they’ve capitalised, or failed to capitalise, a word, or are using terms that were prescribed last year, but are proscribed this year. Meaning isn’t the preserve of the contemporary. This carelessly worded bill doesn’t take that seriously.

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