Totalitarianism Dons A Kilt
Rod Dreher writes at UnHerd that there's a chilling bill in Scotland -- the Hate Crimes and Public Order Bill via the ruling Scottish National Party -- that aims to police what citizens say at home:

In the Soviet Union, not even the home was a refuge from the ears of the totalitarian state. Historian Orlando Figes, in his 2007 book The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia, quotes one Soviet woman's memory of her childhood:

"We were brought up to keep our mouths shut. 'You'll get into trouble for your tongue' -- that's what people said to us children all the time. We went through life afraid to talk. Mama used to say that every other person was an informer. We were afraid of our neighbours, and especially of the police ... Even today, if I see a policeman, I begin to shake with fear."

Decades from now, will a Scotsman brought up in Edinburgh or Glasgow offer a similar testimony to historians documenting our era? The question is by no means absurd, not in light of the Hate Crimes and Public Order Bill brought forth by the ruling Scottish National Party. In testimony before a parliamentary committee this week, Justice Secretary Humza Yousaf said that he believes the reach of the proposed law should cover words spoken in the privacy of people's homes.

If this were to become law, parents would learn to fear their children, trained in schools in the rigid catechism of "social justice" orthodoxies. And not only reading the Bible or the Koran to one's children, but simply owning one could land a Scotsman in the dock on charges of "possessing inflammatory materials". J.K. Rowling would in principle stand to be imprisoned simply for having stood up for biological women in the face of transgender militants -- and her Left-wing political convictions would not spare her.

The proposed bill has drawn harsh criticism from across the Scots political spectrum, such that it is all but unthinkable that it would become law. A poll this past summer found that over two-thirds of Scots voters oppose the law -- yet the Scots Parliament last month voted down a Conservative attempt to table the legislation entirely. Clearly this legislation matters to the government, and those who oppose it risk being tarred as bigots.

Even if the hate crimes bill does not become law, the fact that legislation so shockingly illiberal has come this far is a very dark sign of the times. The bill is yet another instance of "soft totalitarianism" marching through the institutions of Western liberal democracies, rewriting laws, regulations and social codes according to a therapeutic rationale: to make life "safer" for racial, sexual and religious minorities.

Ultimately, as anyone who didn't sleep entirely through history class knows, this, like any removal of free speech, privacy, and other civil liberties, makes it less safe for all of us.

As Dreher writes, quoting Kamila Bendova, a former Soviet dissident:

To stay free to speak the truth, she said, you have to create for yourself a zone of privacy that is inviolate. "Information means power," Bendova told me. "We know from our life under the totalitarian regime that if you know something about someone, you can manipulate him or her. You can use it against them. The secret police have evidence of everything like that. They could use it all against you. Anything!"

The Scots Parliament has the power to prevent Hamza Yousaf from becoming a commissar whose Pink Police State writ extends even into the intimacy of homes and families. Will it? One could not have imagined that such a question would ever be asked in Britain. But then, 2020 has revealed much about who and what we have become.