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forward slash voucher. Vulture. Hello and welcome to coffee house shots.

I'm James Seal and I'm joined today by Lucy Dunn and Isabel Harpen.

Now over the bank holiday weekend the big political news was the introduction on Monday of the new Scottish Hate Crime Act

Lucy tell us about the reaction since that legislation came into effect yesterday

So the hate crime in public order bill came in effect yesterday. So the Hate Crime and Public Order Bill came in yesterday

implemented after being in the works for about four years was first introduced was

March 2020. It came in on April Fool's Day which did cause amusement in some quarters, but on a less flippant note,

certainly there's a lot of concern we can see it across social media, but across the country more generally

about what this will mean for freedom of speech and free debate and particularly for certain types of groups

particularly them gender critical feminists. There's people that are looking at language that is being used in this bill saying that it's quite vague and really lowers the thresholds for the police to investigate reports of hate crimes.

It talks about people committing offenses that a reasonable person might consider to be threatening, abusive or insulting and

might be found to be intending to stir up hatred. It's all quite loose language and

particularly with the trans activist versus

the gender critical feminist debate. There are concerns that vexatious

complaints will be made, will be put in to kind of essentially put on over on people that have a slightly

different point of view and we've certainly seen this worry expressed across

Twitter and social media over the last 24 hours.

And I suppose also it's no longer really a bubble story as Humzy's referred to it last week.

The fact that Ali McCoy has come out and criticized it today would surely suggest that it's going to be not just something that we think of as a kind of a niche

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