Thought Crimes: UK Non-Hate Crime Incidents, By Richard Miller (Somewhere in Europe)

What are we to make of the UK police pursuing "non-hate crime incidents"? An example was the police arriving at a man's place of work and recording that he had tweeted a limerick that satirised the trans agenda; strictly not a hate offence yet, but maybe tomorrow, as misogyny is set to become an act of terrorism: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/aug/29/can-the-uk-fight-extreme-misogyny-as-if-it-were-terrorism-i-have-my-doubts. That is not on, for trans and the gender agenda is big with the British police, almost as much as Islamisation and allowing the rapes of British children, something they have excelled at in the past: https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerscruton/2014/08/30/why-did-british-police-ignore-pakistani-gangs-raping-rotherham-children-political-correctness/.

The recording of names of those who are essentially expressing dissent from the multicultural fascist state of the UK, is of course part of the path that modern Britain is taking becoming a despotic dystopia. But I think the state will collapse soon enough on the present road, as social capital is undermined; these sorts of states are unstable and the present social experiment seems to be highly volatile.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/08/28/the-dreadful-return-of-the-non-crime-hate-incident/

'In this country we have never had a Cheka, a Gestapo or a Stasi. We have never lived in an Orwellian society.'

These were the words of the UK High Court judge, Mr Justice Julian Knowles. In 2020, he condemned Humberside Police for turning up at a man's place of work and previously recording a 'non-crime hate incident' (NCHI) against his name. The 'non-crime' that brought the police to an innocent man's door? He had tweeted a limerick poking fun at the trans issue.

Worryingly, the High Court's stark warning against the Orwellianism of the old NCHI regime seems to have been lost on new home secretary Yvette Cooper. The Telegraph reports today that she is planning to drop the Tories' guidance and significantly expand police powers to monitor and make records of supposedly hateful speech. Apparently, this is part of a new 'zero tolerance' approach to anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.

It is hard to understate just how sinister this plan is – and what a huge threat it poses to free speech. Under the old rules, soon to be revived, NCHIs could be recorded by police whenever someone was accused of showing 'hostility towards religion, race or transgender identity'. The police did not need any evidence of such hostility before recording an NCHI against your name. What mattered was that someone, somewhere, had perceived another person's legal speech or non-criminal behaviour as being motivated by hate.

Worse still, if you were accused of this non-crime, then you might have got a phone call or a knock on the door from the police. Or you may not have even been informed at all. As the perception of hate was all that mattered, you would not have been able to defend yourself against an accusation in any case. While no one has ever served time for committing a non-crime, NCHIs can appear on enhanced DBS checks. This is police-enforced cancel culture.

Before the use of NCHIs was curtailed, hundreds of thousands had been recorded against Britons for all kinds of trivial incidents. Infamous examples included a man whistling the Bob the Builder theme song at his neighbour, a dog pooing on someone's lawn, an Asian man calling his friend a 'terrorist', and an elderly woman beeping her horn at a slow driver. Not even children were safe from the speechpolice. Over 2,000 NCHIs were recorded against under-17s.

Just how authoritarian must our new home secretary be to see no problem with any of this? The return of the non-crime hate incident is yet another clear sign that free speech is in serious jeopardy under this Labour government."