By Dean Maddox, Public Safety & Crime Reporter

While Golden State residents wrestle with sky-high taxes, street crime, and regulatory overload, Scotland has taken social engineering to new extremes.

After a long shift loading pallets, I settled in with a cold beer and started digging into a video breakdown of Scottish politics. What I found wasn’t intended to be a joke, but it read like something out of the Onion or the Babylon Bee.

The real policies and proposals from Scotland’s ruling SNP reads like a progressive wish list gone off the rails, and Scotland isn’t some far-off curiosity. It’s the preview of the direction Sacramento is already steering us if we don’t demand a hard change. Among the measures passed or seriously proposed:

• Minimum alcohol pricing, implemented in 2018 and later increased, making even modest drinking more expensive in the name of public health.
• A push to phase out wood-burning stoves in new homes under updated heating standards. The move was so unpopular with rural residents that officials were forced to dial it back.
• Guidance to ban birthday cakes and sweet treats in nurseries and preschools to combat childhood obesity.
• Elimination of unlimited free soda refills in restaurants and pubs as part of restrictions on high-sugar drinks.
• Discussion of cat containment zones or curfews to protect wildlife. The idea drew national ridicule before being walked back.
• Removal of Scotland’s national poet, Robert Burns, as a required study in some higher-level English curricula in favor of greater “diversity.”

The crown jewel of this approach was the 2021 Hate Crime and Public Order Act. It replaced Scotland’s ancient 1843 blasphemy law with broad new provisions against “stirring up hatred.” The legislation was championed by then-Justice Secretary Humza Yousaf, who once drew attention for a speech lamenting the overrepresentation of “white, white, white” individuals in positions of power. Once the law took effect, critics wasted no time filing complaints about that very speech.

Here in California, we’ve already seen the same impulse: soda taxes, plastic bag bans, gas stove restrictions, mandates on everything from car engines to straws, and an ever-expanding list of speech codes and equity initiatives. Sacramento politicians routinely look to European models like Scotland for inspiration.

The warning is clear. If Californians don’t push back hard, at the ballot box, in city halls, and in the state legislature, the nanny-state road Scotland is traveling becomes our destination. Birthday-cake bans in preschools, cat curfews in suburbs, speech laws that turn old complaints into crimes, and ever-tighter controls on what working families can buy, burn, or say after a long day.

California is already halfway down the road to Edinburgh. The only question left is whether we let the control freaks finish the job or whether we finally demand a U-turn.

The choice belongs to us.