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Comment by weego | Hacker News Reader

It's just standard 'edgy' anti-english diatribe from a Scot. It's really nothing I don't hear regularly either out in public or from friend-adjacent people here.

It's bad taste and trashy but that's kind of it.

The problem is exactly that it's not an unusual attitude to hear. The difference is who it was aimed at. So for me the real issue is that we're cherry picking when we apply a very vague and loosely applied law based on who said it to whom, and in my eyes it should be a valid case for the defense, and element of a judges decision for sentencing, of just how situational it is.

Making 'an example' of someone is not a basis for a societally-positive criminal justice system.

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The problem is exactly that the law shouldn't exist in the first place. Such laws violate the fundamental human right of free expression. Repeal the law and then you won't have to worry about uneven application.

There is no such thing as a fundamental human right to free expression.

You would be better served by pointing out that governments tend to become more authoritarian over time & the harder citizens resist authoritarian creep, the longer they have before a bloody revolution is usually required.

I believe the use of the word fundamental here refers to the fact that free-speech underlies all other rights. If you don't have free speech then you don't really have any rights at all.

Right but the K doesn't have that, that's primarily a construct of USA.

I'm from the US, so please forgive my ignorance of UK law in this regard, but is this case special at all because the target of the insult was knighted (or whatever the correct term is)? Would it have been the same result if the target was a "random" non-knighted individual?

That sort of thing generally shouldn’t make a difference in the U.K. But in this case I think the law gives special protection to public figures and I guess people who are knighted tend to be public figures.

It used to be the case that peers (ie lords) had a somewhat different treatment in the law: they would be tried for crimes in the House of Lords instead of a regular court. The idea of that seems more reasonable the further back in time you go as the nobility had more power. However that is not the case anymore either.

It continues to be the case that the justice system is more accessible to some people than others and having better access likely correlates with the probability that one is knighted.

The target being a "public figure" might well have factored into the Crown Office's decision to prosecute, as part of the public interest test under the Prosecution Code.

If the target were a random member of the public, it seems that the offence would still be made out (he would still be found guilty) but perhaps the sentencing would be less severe.

It does seem that judicial discretion was thrown to the wind here. I don't agree that the sentencing reflects the gravity of the offence, given the mitigating circumstances raised by his defence counsel.

This is definitely a Celtic Vs Rangers thing rather than an England/Scotland one.

Unfortunately we in Glasgow are still dealing with this nonsense in 2022.

And in classic English fashion, they’ll start picking random Scots to make an example of, and make the problem worse still.

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