My Kafkaesque encounter with Police Scotland

Why is the service so determined to stop me knowing the details of an alleged ‘hate crime’?

Paul Embery is one of the most interesting, insightful and original voices to have emerged in British journalism for some time — Douglas Murray

Photo: JarroNevsbaru, CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

It was in early 2022 that I first became aware of this apparently heinous crime. Someone on social media had, I recall, linked to a news item which reported that police were appealing for the help of the public in their hunt for a person, or persons, who had placed ‘illegal’ posters around the town of Largs in Ayrshire.

According to the investigating officer, the posters contained derogatory material which amounted to a ‘hate crime’.

I was curious. We were, after all, living in an age when, in some people’s eyes, causing any sort of offence constituted a crime, and police across Britain were rushing around and hunting down anyone guilty of ‘wrong-speak’. For example, formal police investigations had been launched into the display of stickers in Oxford that declared a woman to be an ‘adult human female’ and in Perthshire that stated it was ‘okay to be white’.

So what, I wondered, had been so controversial about the posters in Largs that persuaded the local constabulary to make this special appeal for information?

I resolved to find out.