Do you dislike anyone? You’re a criminal now!

(Thursday/Friday blog) There’s a photo circulating on the Internet. It appears to show a police officer giving a speech about hate crimes, or �hostility� as he terms it:

This is really important. It shows how we have drifted from having one of the world’s most admired (and copied) criminal justice systems to one that George Orwell warned about in “1984”.

Here’s how our rulers moved from freedom of speech to total thought and speech control in four easy steps:

Step 1: Invent the idea of a ‘hate crime’

The original definition of a hate crime in the UK is (I believe) from the�Public Order Act 1986

�A person who uses threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or displays any written material which is threatening, abusive or insulting, is guilty of an offence if�

(a) they intend thereby to stir up racial hatred, or

(b) having regard to all the circumstances racial hatred is likely to be stirred up thereby.�

Why we needed the concept of a ‘hate crime’ is unclear as there were already plenty of other real criminal offences that could be used against someone spewing insults and threats.

Step 2 – ‘Guilty because someone says so’

Then somehow the definition of a ‘hate crime’ expanded:

‘The Association of Chief Police Officers and the CPS have agreed a common definition of hate crime: “Any criminal offence which is perceived by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice based on a person’s race or perceived race; religion or perceived religion; sexual orientation or perceived sexual orientation; disability or perceived disability and any crime motivated by hostility or prejudice against a person who is transgender or perceived to be transgender.”

The key idea here is that this new definition means the police don�t need to �prove hatred�. It’s enough that any person claims they perceive hatred for you to be automatically guilty.

After nearly a millennia of proof being required and anyone being innocent until found guilty, the British Police have decided they no longer need proof to accuse someone of being a criminal.

Step 3 – Words are as harmful as real violence

Next, the Director of Public Prosecutions, Alison Saunders, decided, without any act of parliament, that words written on the Internet should be prosecuted in the same way as actual physical attacks.

Step 4 – Hostility and unfriendliness are now ‘hate crimes’

And now we appear to have some useless Plod lecturing other Plods that ‘hostility’ and ‘unfriendliness’ can be considered as ‘hate crimes’.

It�s almost laughable, except these people are a large, armed gang of political-correctness-loving thugs and they have the right to kick in your door, arrest you, and generally make your life hell.

Furthermore the Criminal Justice Act 2008 added sexual orientation and religion but also clarified that:

�In the circumstances of hatred based on religious belief or on sexual orientation, the relevant act (namely, words, behaviour, written material, or recordings, or programme)�must be threatening�and not just abusive or insulting.�

In the past, insulting someone or some group wasn’t a criminal offense, it�s not�threatening, it�s merely abusive. There has been a clear distinction for years, and one which by and large the police were supposedly abiding by. The CPS even published a handy picture showing what a hate crime actually�is

Even though intimidation, harassment, damaging property and violence sounds rather all encompassing it�s hard to argue that a single case of a slur could ever really be considered harassment, the vast majority of negative interactions on social media, short of threatening violence never used to be classed as ‘hate crime’.

Calling someone a monkey, making fun of their mental illness or being unfriendly should not be hate crimes. They never have been. The police have no more right to define hostility or unfriendliness as criminal acts than they do to outlaw toasters, and kick in the door of every person they suspect is harbouring a toaster with intent to make a piece of toast. Without relevant legislation it�s completely illegal for them to do so.

By redefining hate crimes as mere �hostility� and saying �we do not need to prove hatred� or even that �unfriendliness� can be classed as a hate crime the police are attempting to rewrite statute and enforce laws they themselves have invented. This is a clear breach of the behavioural code they themselves should abide by, an attempt by our Orwellian Thought Police to become not only Judge, Jury and Executioner but the legislator as well.

It’s the law of the madhouse! It�s insanity!

And somehow, we’ve allowed it to happen.