Toby Young
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But any schadenfreude I experienced was short-lived because I don’t think the police’s job is to intervene in social media spats and penalise whichever side is failing to comply with the latest diktats of the diversity-and-inclusion lobby. Call me a reactionary, but I think the police should be out solving crimes like theft, assault and burglary, not enforcing politically correct dogma. Linehan is experiencing exactly the kind of police harassment that Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychology professor, predicted would happen in his own country two years ago if the law was changed to make it an offence to refuse to call a trans person by their preferred gender pronoun. Needless to say, Linehan has ridiculed Peterson on Twitter many times.
West Yorkshire Police isn’t entirely to blame for this misuse of resources. The concept of a ‘hate crime’ was first introduced into law by the last Labour administration and then defined in 2007 as ‘any criminal offence which is perceived by the victim or any other person to be motivated by hostility or prejudice towards someone based on a personal characteristic’. At present, there are five ‘protected characteristics’: disability, race, religion, sexual orientation and transgender identity, although the government is carrying out a comprehensive review of all hate crime legislation.
Don’t expect this to result in anything sensible; on the contrary, the government will almost certainly enlarge the number of ‘protected characteristics’ to include ‘gender’, following the demands of Labour MP Stella Creasy to make ‘misogyny’ a hate crime. Given that some feminists believe misogyny is responsible for everything from climate change to mansplaining, the mind boggles at the scope this will give to left-wing loons to sick the police on anyone who challenges their progressive mumbo jumbo.
Ordinary coppers don’t want to be spending their days chasing down thought criminals, obviously. Last month, the new head of the Police Federation complained that his 120,000 members were being forced to follow up hate crime reports when they would much rather be investigating burglaries, two-thirds of which were not properly investigated by the police last year. It’s their managers who are at fault, such as the bright spark at South Yorkshire Police who encouraged Twitter users to report ‘non-crime hate incidents’ — episodes so trivial they don’t even meet the absurdly capacious definition of a hate crime. I have instructed my ten-year-old son to stop calling his teenage sister ‘spotty’ in case he receives a visit from Inspector Knacker.
So even though Linehan is a loathsome, virtue-signalling prig, he deserves our support. He has discovered, belatedly, that those on the left are as vulnerable as those on the right if we don’t all stand up for free speech.
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