Daily Mail, November 26 2002

George Orwell, you should be alive at this moment. Liberty in Britain has never been under greater threat from such upside-down values and a sinister misuse of language.

The government’s new crime package – opposed most noisily by the left -- simply tears up fundamental principles of justice. The presumption of innocence will be put through the salami-slicer. Witnesses will be allowed gaily to blacken the character of both defendants and other witnesses in court without a shred of proof.

But further assaults are being mounted upon our freedoms. For while muggings and other violent crimes soar, the police are devoting more and more effort to criminalising the wrong kind of opinion.

Yet many on the left actually support the abolition of this kind of civil liberty. And you also won’t find them leaping to protest that Islamic fascists are currently getting away with incitement to murder and threatening our rights to life and safety. On the contrary, any attempt to fight terror effectively provokes a megaphone diatribe against xenophobia, a thought crime which can now land you in the dock in Europe and no doubt will soon be locking up minds here, too.

Travelling on the Tube the other day, I was startled to learn from a poster that Commander Cressida Dick, head of the Metropolitan Police’s ‘Diversity Directorate’ (yes, really) was urging us all to report to the police anyone whose views we found hateful. If anyone had committed a thought crime -- abusing people because of their faith, race, religion or disability or because they were lesbian, gay, bisexual or transsexual – Commander Dick wanted us to provide the police with ‘a name, an address or even a description of offenders’.

A few days later, I fell into conversation at a dinner with a woman who told me that she ‘hates the Jews’. As a Jew myself, I was very shocked (though these days not, alas, surprised). If I had heeded Commander Dick, I would no doubt have marched my dinner companion off to the Diversity Directorate or my local ‘Community Safety Unit’ (oh Orwell!) to be interrogated by the thought police.

The very idea is (or should be) utterly unthinkable. What kind of policing is this, where people are urged to inform against anyone they fancy has insulted them? What kind of society have we become, where we are to turn copper’s nark against our neighbours -- not because of what they do, but because of what they think?

Commander Dick declared people should not be subjected to abuse ‘because of what they believe in’. So now – if they believe what she decrees to be the wrong kind of thing -- she’s going to lock them up instead!

This is no idle or abstract threat. Robin Page, a former presenter of TV’s One Man and His Dog, was accused of ‘bombarding visitors with pro-hunting propaganda’ at Frampton country fair in Gloucestershire. As a result, Sergeant Geoff Clark of Stonehouse police said he would ‘like to hear from anyone who was upset by the commentary’.

And Mr Page’s alleged crime to justify this outrageous police fishing expedition? Merely saying that country folk had the same right to protect their own culture as minorities had to protect theirs. ‘If there is a black, vegetarian, Muslim, asylum-seeking, one-legged, lesbian lorry driver present,’ he joked, ‘then you may be offended at what I am going to say, as I want the same rights that you have got already’.

He never spoke a truer word. For that, he was arrested and thrown into a cell. Since he had suffered six break-ins on his farm when no policeman would travel the four miles from Cambridge to take a statement, it seemed more than a little strange that Sergeant Clark was prepared to travel 200 miles to investigate a les than pressing incident. For there was nothing offensive, let alone criminal, in his remarks. He was making a joke -- not against these sainted minorities, but against political correctness.

Until now, we have associated such authoritarian behaviour with a police state, not the Gloucestershire constabulary. But this is by no means a lone example. An elderly street preacher, Harry Hammond, was fined £300 for displaying a placard which said: ‘Stop immorality. Stop homosexuality. Stop lesbianism’. To his credit, even the gay activist Peter Tatchell protested at this assault on free speech. Bigotry may offend – but a liberal society deals with it through argument.

And last month, Alistair Scott was convicted of ‘religiously aggravated, threatening, abusive or insulting behaviour’ – after a row over September 11 with a Moslem, who called him a ‘Zionist pig-f*****’ and said all Americans deserved to die.

Such apparent one-sidedness is particularly alarming. For the law officers are notably reluctant to act against people distributing material which is not just offensive but may inflame real violence.

In the light of the terrorist threat to Britain, this reluctance is astonishing. In leaflets and at meetings, Islamic fascists call for ‘death to the Jews’. London is considered such a centre for Al Q’aeda and other Islamic terrorist activity that it has been dubbed ‘Londonistan’. Yet virtually nothing is done.

The Home Office says such people stay just on the right side of the law. Rot. This inertia is a failure of political will. And what kind of a law is the government trying to justify here, that turns a deaf ear to regular incitement to murderous frenzy while mounting dawn raids on people with politically incorrect views?

It seems the less able or willing the law officers are to take action against any real threat to life and limb, the more determined they become to lock people up for opinions with which they disagree. The highest crime, it now seems, is to give offence.

Later this week, the Crown Prosecution Service is to announce a greater emphasis on ‘homophobic’ offences. Of course people who hurt homosexuals or any other minority should be brought to justice. But is this really a priority for the police, when everyone – gay people included – needs the police to be patrolling the streets against our mounting crisis of gang warfare, drug-dealing and all violent crime?

More worrying still, hate crimes are defined under the doctrine promulgated by the Macpherson inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence, that an incident is racist if anyone involved thinks it is. Because of this dreadful piece of sophistry, the police are now patrolling not the streets but the mind.

Any assault is foul and should be stopped. But the real purpose of categorising hate crime is symbolic: to destroy prejudice and alter human nature. Such subjective and politicised definitions threaten to unleash a witch-hunt. This is not only unjust -- it will not destroy prejudice.

On the contrary, it will merely increase the risk of violence towards minorities. The more people believe our governing class has taken leave of its collective senses and is standing justice on its head, the more repetitions we will have of last week’s disturbing ward victory in Blackburn by the thugs of the British National Party.

Political correctness corrodes a society’s willingness to fight for its survival. At a time when Islamic fascism threatens the well-being of peaceful Moslems no less than that of any other citizen, and when rampant crime makes everyone a possible victim, for official thinking on liberty and justice to be so back-to-front is potentially lethal to the security of us all.

Posted by admin at November 26, 2002