From next month in Scotland you’ll be able to drop into a sex shop, make an anonymous accusation of hate crime against someone you dislike and potentially see your bete noir locked up. You think I’m joking – that this is an April Fool come early. I only wish it was. In two weeks’ time, this will be the law of the land in Scotland under the SNP’s iniquitous Hate Crime Act which makes ‘stirring up hatred’ a criminal offence punishable by 7 years in jail.

The sex shop in question is an LGBTQ-friendly establishment in Glasgow’s Merchant City. It is a ‘third-party reporting centre’ set up by Police Scotland to make it easier to accuse someone of hate crime. There will be 411 of these snitching centres across Scotland located everywhere from mushroom farms to caravan sites. Trans activists across the land will be able to accuse JK Rowling, 24/7, of being a transphobe.

Scotland will be a country where Twitter spats matter more than burglaries

The trans campaigner India Willoughby has already tried to have the novelist prosecuted for misgendering him/her. After the complaint was dismissed by Northumberland Police, Willoughby’s supporters made clear they will be accusing her in Scotland. They might even succeed.

The Scottish government’s definition of ‘stirring up hatred’ is so vague that ministers have given up trying to explain it. They just refer you to the Police Scotland website where a hate crime is defined as ‘any crime which is understood by the victim or any other person as being motivated, wholly or partly by malice or ill will towards a social group’.

What on earth does that mean? It does not mean harassment or threatening behaviour, which is already illegal. The purpose is clearly to criminalise speech which some minority groups find offensive or abusive. It gives carte blanche to anyone who feels they have been misgendered, ridiculed, or that their religion has been disrespected, to leap to their nearest reporting centre to ventilate their hurt feelings. As the Scottish MP Joanna Cherry KC puts it, the law will first of all be ‘weaponised’ against gender-critical women.

Police Scotland has even produced a risible cartoon campaign featuring a ‘hate monster’. This creature warns Scots who may be ‘angry and frustrated and take it out on others… in other words [they] commit a hate crime’. By what legislative madness could being angry be construed as a crime?Forget the usual test of whether or not a ‘reasonable person’ would find the offence to be criminal – the accuser is judge and jury here. Nor is there any need for evidence since this offence is entirely subjective.

This draconian thought crime applies even in the privacy of your own home. The ‘dwelling defence’ in the old 1986 Public Order Act, which exonerates people living under the same roof from prosecution, has been dispensed with in the Hate Crime Act and Public Order (Scotland) Act. The law was passed three years ago and has been stalled until now, largely because the police didn’t relish the thought of barging into someone’s home to record a hate crime every time a teenager accuses their dad of being homophobic or racist.

The Scottish Police Federation, an organisation not perhaps known for defending freedom of speech, has warned that the law would ‘paralyse freedom of expression for individuals and organisations by threatening prosecution for the mere expression of opinion’. The First Minister, Humza Yousaf, insisted that this was scaremongering and no one could be prosecuted for what they think. However, it is clear that what they say can and will be prosecuted if the ‘victims’ perceive what they think and say to be discriminatory.

Even when there is no crime committed, Police Scotland will record the complaint automatically as a ‘hate incident’. This will no doubt be attached to the disclosure file of any accused individual seeking a job as a social worker or teacher. This is guilt by accusation, and there is no right of appeal.

Police Scotland say they will investigate every single report of hate, even though they have already said they will no longer prosecute 24,000 other minor offences. Scotland will be a country where Twitter spats matter more than burglaries.

We can only hope that this illiberal new law will collapse when its contradictions become apparent in a court of law. This happened with previous ill-considered measures like the Offensive Behaviour at Football Act, which tried to criminalise football chants, or the Named Persons scheme which tried to appoint a state guardian for every child.

Is there anything concerned citizens could do to hasten this collapse? Well, how about going to your local snitching centre to challenge the police themselves? After all, the departing chief constable of Scotland, Iain Livingstone, recently said the organisation he led is ‘institutionally racist’. Could they not be arraigned for feeding the hate monster? A case of ‘ok sunshine I’m nicked’?