Scotland, 2025, and Orwell’s Warning

There’s a sentence you hear a lot now, usually said quietly, usually by men who’ve learned the hard way that volume doesn’t help.

People scoff at it because it sounds like self-pity. Or because the subject makes everyone tense. Or because we’ve been trained into a simple script: believe, support, convict, move on. Anything that slows that script gets treated like an insult.

In 1984, the police don’t exist to discover truth, they exist to enforce the Party’s version of reality. The Thought Police are not detectives in the ordinary sense. They’re guardians of the narrative. The system isn’t built to test competing accounts, it’s built to make dissent feel impossible, and to make compliance feel like survival.

Animal Farm tells the same story with different clothing. The dogs are not “investigators”. They are enforcement. Rules change because power says so, and when someone objects, the objection itself becomes proof that they’re the problem.

Scotland isn’t Orwell’s world. But Scotland can still fall into Orwell’s pattern, where institutions drift away from truth-finding and towards outcome-management, and the public is trained to treat doubt as wicked rather than necessary.

The courtroom that can’t hear half the story

One of the most corrosive changes in modern Scottish sexual offence trials isn’t loud. It’s procedural. It’s what the jury never gets to hear.

The Court didn’t treat this as a technical complaint. It went back to first principles. The purpose of a criminal trial is to determine whether the accused is guilty, and it is fundamental that the innocent must not be convicted. That protection means nothing if the accused is blocked from effectively challenging the case against him.

It also made a point that lands like a punch if you’ve lived through this system. The current approach is liable to deprive an accused of putting “obviously relevant” evidence before the jury, evidence which, if accepted, would significantly strengthen the defence.

Then the line Scotland cannot ignore. The Supreme Court said the Scottish courts are under a duty to modify the current approach so decisions on admissibility conform with Convention rights, even though this will cause disruption and delay in sexual offence cases in the system.

This is what Orwell understood. You don’t always control a population by brute force. You can do it by controlling what can be said, what can be heard, and what the “official story” is allowed to include. In 1984, the “memory hole” isn’t just about burning paper. It’s about deciding what reality is permitted to contain.

Accused.Scot has been saying this in plain language for a while: a jury cannot judge what it is forbidden to see. The point isn’t that protections for complainers are wrong. It’s that “protection” becomes dangerous when it turns into a curated edit of events, and the defence is left arguing through a keyhole.

The keyhole trial, where credibility is the whole case

Many rape trials are not battles of forensic proof. They are battles of credibility. There is often no CCTV, no independent eyewitness, no medical evidence that answers the critical issue. You’re left with competing narratives, and a jury asked who they believe.

That’s why context is not decoration. It’s the case. When the defence is blocked from leading connected context, the jury isn’t assessing the story, it’s assessing a stripped-down version of the story. And once you accept that stripping-down as normal, you’re already half-way into Orwell’s territory, where language stays the same but meaning changes underneath it.

When allegation becomes “corroboration”

Scotland still has corroboration, on paper. That should be a safety rail. But in “private” sexual cases, credibility often becomes the whole case. The Supreme Court acknowledged that reality, and also acknowledged the routes through which cases may be treated as sufficiently corroborated in practice, even where independent proof of the critical issue is absent.

Here’s the danger: once a case is framed as “pattern”, you stop asking whether each allegation is independently proved. You start asking whether the accused seems like the kind of man who would do it. That is not evidence. It is vibe dressed up as logic.

This is one reason the public rarely understands what’s happened until it’s too late. They’re not told the mechanics. They’re told a story. A story that makes the verdict feel inevitable.

The press decides the villain

Orwell’s propaganda machine worked by repetition. Not by argument. It taught people what to feel, who to hate, and when to stop asking questions.

Scotland doesn’t need a Ministry of Truth for something similar to happen. It has headlines. It has the pile-on. It has reporting that can turn an allegation into a lifetime label in ten words, while the correction, if it comes, arrives late and small.

Accused.Scot has put it bluntly: the press decides the villain long before the court decides anything. And juries are made of the public. They don’t walk into court as blank slates. They walk in carrying the atmosphere they’ve been breathing for years.

Policing, priorities, and the temptation of numbers

Every serious person agrees victims of rape and domestic abuse deserve competent investigation and justice. The problem starts when a system becomes so performance-measured that it quietly rewards closure over truth, and “progress” over caution.

Police Scotland publishes performance and accountability reporting that includes measures such as rape volume and rape detection rates. Publishing metrics is not wrong. But metrics can change behaviour. And if an accused person experiences investigators working backwards from an assumption, it doesn’t always feel like policing, it feels like processing.

This is the Orwell point again. Systems don’t need to announce “we no longer care about truth”. They just need to build a culture where truth is less valuable than the appearance of being on the right side of the approved moral story.

How ordinary life gets re-labelled

One of the most dangerous shifts is subtle. Ordinary relationship history gets re-labelled after the fact. What was once mutual mess becomes “a pattern”. What was once regret becomes “realisation”. What was once a bad breakup becomes a criminal narrative.

Accused.Scot has described how pressure, memory and policing can collide after a breakup, and how questioning and framing can tilt a memory into something darker, sometimes years later. Whether a reader agrees with every line or not, the broader warning is clear: if the first statement is shaped by stress, suggestion, or the need for support, the whole case can end up built on shifting ground.

Reform season, and the direction of travel

This is all happening during major justice reform. The Victims, Witnesses, and Justice Reform (Scotland) Act 2025 received Royal Assent on 30 October 2025.

Some jury changes begin on 1 January 2026, under commencement and transitional regulations made in December 2025. None of this is automatically wrong in principle. But reform doesn’t happen in a vacuum. If reform lands in a culture where doubt is treated as hostility, the public stops asking whether the process is still balanced.

Speech, fear, and the shrinking room to disagree

Orwell’s genius was noticing that fear doesn’t only come from prisons. It also comes from social punishment. People learn to self-censor because the cost of being misunderstood is too high.

Scotland’s legal landscape shifted again when the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 was implemented on 1 April 2024. Whatever your politics, that reality changes how safe people feel to speak, especially on contentious topics.

Across the UK, there has also been high-profile public concern about the proportionality of prison sentences for non-violent offences arising from social media posts, which Parliament itself has debated and briefed in 2025. You don’t have to defend offensive speech to recognise the trust problem this creates.

When people feel the state will come down hard on the wrong words, while the public sees violence and serious harm handled slowly or inconsistently, trust collapses. That collapse is where Orwell lives. In Animal Farm, the sheep chant and stop thinking. In 1984, people repeat the approved line because it’s safer than asking what’s true.

A question for Scotland

The UK Supreme Court has now put a warning in black and white. The current approach is liable to violate fair trial rights, because it can prevent the accused from putting obviously relevant evidence before a jury. That should matter to everyone, including people who have never been accused of anything in their life.

You can hold two truths at once. Sexual offending is real, victims deserve justice, and Scotland must respond properly. And also, the accused must be able to give a full answer. If the defence is gagged from presenting the real narrative, you don’t get justice. You get a performance.