JOHN Humphries, one of the UK’s most respected broadcasters, recently said: “Misogyny is moronic but making it a hate crime is the justice of the Mad Hatter”. Well, John, best not come to Scotland because the tea party is in full swing.

Adnan Ahmed, aka Addy Agame, the so-called “pick-up artist”, has just been released from prison after his conviction for threatening and abusive behaviour towards five women was quashed.

What Ahmed claimed was simply an act of chatting up young women during the day, often on busy streets in Glasgow, was defined in court as “threatening behaviour”. Due to this, as well as the two-year prison sentence, Ahmed was put on the sex offenders' register for ten years.

Addy Agame would post his exploits on Youtube and it was this rather than complaints from the alleged victims that started the process of his prosecution. However, it was not the videoing but the actual behaviour towards the young women that was seen as criminal.

What makes this case all the more interesting is the role played in it by Scotland’s illiberal elites.

A short BBC “investigative” documentary helped trigger the police action, meanwhile in Holyrood, Nicola Sturgeon used this TV programme to denounce Ahmed’s behaviour which, she argued, showed why we need new laws to tackle hatred and 'gender-based violence'. Furthermore, Glasgow SNP councillor Rhiannon Spear said; “If you don't think rape culture is present within our society, have a watch of this. This is turning consent and coercion into a game”.

Despite there being no violence or rape, the scene was set for Sheriff Lindsay Wood, at the end of Ahmed’s trial, to act as prosecutor rather than a neutral arbiter of justice and act in a manner that risked, in the words of the judges in the Criminal Courts Appeal, “demeaning the standing of the judiciary in the eyes of both the legal profession and of the public,” and engaging, “in an exercise which could only be described as cross-examination”, resulting in a miscarriage of justice.

There are many words we could use to describe Adnan Ahmed, most would be made up of four letters but it is the behaviour and outlook of the new cultural, legal and political elites that we should really be investigating. An extremist outlook that is moving ever closer to the criminalisation of potentially all forms of interpersonal interactions.

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