Police Target Bad Thoughts and Hate Speech
26.03.2020
The zealous police in Scotland seemed determined to eradicate “hate” from public life. Their favoured instruments to achieve this are hate crime laws and a batch of official guidelines, which distinguish between hate crimes and “hate incidents”. A hate crime is a criminal act with the added element of hatred for a person’s race, religion or “gender”. When the action is not criminal like telling an offensive joke, the police file it as a “hate incident” on their national database. In Scotland the police logged 858 “hate incidents” in 2019 while in England and Wales there were some 120,000 such cases. If your name shows up repeatedly on this police file, you may become a “person of
interest”. Sounds threatening!
Being recorded for the “hate incident” is no laughing matter. Employers often ask the police to check a would-be employee, and, should the applicant appear on this database for a “hate incident”, even though a non-crime, securing a job could become very difficult.
This drive to purify society of “offensive language” has upset free-speech defenders especially comedians, and has the potential to close down debate on serious issues, as public figures fear to comment on a widening list of taboo subjects. As the story below illustrates, all the police need is a complaint from an offended citizen, and you can be in trouble. Yes, we have freedom of speech, as long as no one is offended. Hurt feelings are not grounds for criminalising rude jokes. Jokes or disagreeable gestures should not be confused with continual harassment that may require police intervention.
Addendum: When Harry Miller, a retired policeman from Lincoln, Humberside, copied a humorous transgender limerick on his Twitter page, little did he think that Police Officer Gul would knock at his door, and question him for committing a hate incident against trans people. A trans activist posted a complaint about Miller, alleging that his social media comments made his place of work an “unsafe environment” for transgender employees. PC Gul lectured Miller, saying “I’ve been on a course and what you need to understand is that you can have a foetus with a female brain that grows male body parts and that’s what a transgender person is.”
When told his action was registered as a “hate incident”, Miller asked the officer why he was wasting his time; he replied, “We need to check your thinking.” Miller took a court challenge against Humberside Police and won the case. On a more alarming note, at a time when the police are chronically short of money, and violent crime has increased in Humberside, officers spend time to trawl through social media and track down rude jokes?
See: the YouTube video of Posie Parker speaking about her “Illegal Opinions”, being questioned by the police for hate speech, and her treatment at the hands of the trans lobby. Posie Parker is pen name of the feminist campaigner Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull.
Online Abuse Threatens Livelihood of Celebrity
In Ireland, the celebrated Graham Linehan, the co-creator of the Father Ted series on RTÉ and much else, found himself ferociously attacked for his opinion on what passes for the trans ideology. His comments on Twitter where he has a huge following, were described as bigoted, transphobic and hate speech, and, when RTÉ announced that he would be one of 10 speakers in the TV discussion on transgender in January 2019, an online campaign erupted to have him removed from the programme.
He considers the upsurge of children wanting powerful drugs to change their “gender” as deeply disturbing, and the current proposal to allow “self-identification”, no matter how young they may be, as dangerous. He described the current gender ideology as “dangerous, incoherent nonsense”. Make no mistake. This man is on the radical left of politics and social issues, and proclaims he is an atheist and a full-on supporter of “abortion rights”, having been a prominent campaigner to repeal the 8th amendment. Yet, today, he is, in his own words, “one of the most loathed figures on the Internet”. His public events have been cancelled, he has been sued, warned by the police and
shunned by former friends.
He considers the upsurge of children wanting powerful drugs to change their “gender” as deeply disturbing, and the current proposal to allow “self-identification”, no matter how young they may be, as dangerous. He described the current gender ideology as “dangerous, incoherent nonsense”. Make no mistake. This man is on the radical left of politics and social issues, and proclaims he is an atheist and a full-on supporter of “abortion rights”, having been a prominent campaigner to repeal the 8th amendment. Yet, today, he is, in his own words, “one of the most loathed figures on the Internet”. His public events have been cancelled, he has been sued, warned by the police and
shunned by former friends.