Several years previously, I’d gone to Shabbat Services in Deauville. The synagogue door was burnt black and blistered from the fire that had been set the previous Yom Kippur, and the shul members decided to preserve it as a reminder. Back in the Seventies, the reminder was constant. Every day we Jews in Chicago and New York saw tattoos on the left arms of our neighbors.

These days, Holocaust Remembrance Ceremonies, however well intentioned, are inert. For, in the Diaspora, young Jews unaffected by antisemitism, and removed from living reminders of outrage, were invited to express sympathy for what were, to them, historical characters. (Israeli Jews, of course, spent and spend entire lives facing the reality of savagery.) We American Jews mouthed “never again”, but did nothing to prevent the reoccurrence. Our comfortable, old-school liberal attitude of “we must change the narrative” was essentially sedative. We did nothing to “change the narrative”. This was not indictable as there was no “narrative”. There was simply the endorphin of permitted brutality.

This year’s Erev-Chanukah, the day before Chanukah, broke with the news of the slaughter of Sydney Jews. That evening, when we first heard of the murder of Rob and Michelle Reiner, we assumed that it was more antisemitic savagery, and, at our Chanukah table, our actual Holocaust Remembrance was that husband-and-wife conference which has been going on intermittently for 2,000 years: “Oh my God, is it time to move…?” The traditional Jewish conference was intermittent as, with most potentially vast changes, it is always too early, save when it is too late.

At its release in 1982, someone wrote of Sophie’s Choice that it was “Mandingo for Jews”. I have always loathed the film subgenre of Jew Porn, allowing folk to feel they are experiencing Good Will for watching actors portray “The Other” being thrown into The Oven.

The inescapable notion that Jews are The Other inspires and allows us to be treated as other-than-human. The crocodile sympathy of moviegoers, and devotees of Anne Frank, Fiddler on the Roof, and so on, is expressed for Jews as victims. And only as victims. The Jew, here, given an award for passivity. Not only is the award moot, it is not even extended to a real Jew.

Forty thousand firearms were taken from the Jews of Warsaw before the Nazis exterminated them. The Jews, of course, hoped to better their position by acquiescence. Hope is the placebo of the powerless. But it is not a strategy.

Violence is a constant and universal possibility. That it can be deterred by Good Feelings was disproved, rather dramatically, by the slaughter of young Israelis at a music festival on October 7.

Some years back I was tasked with taking my niece on a college tour of Brown. The student guide showed us this and that on the beautiful campus, and pointed to a phone kiosk. “There’s one every hundred yards,” he said. “Which will summon our gloriously unarmed Campus Police.”

I thought, at the time, that the University must be a congeries of fools. Not so much as their cops were unarmed (that was, to my mind, simply a dereliction of common sense, understandable in an institution largely engaged in make-believe), but that its representative was selling to prospective buyers, the notion that to be unprotected was laudable — an attitude certainly of interest to the violent. To announce to the world that campus cops were unarmed was merely stupid. To praise that folly was delusion on the order of “changing the narrative”.

A few years back, three Presidents of the Ivy League were called to Congress to testify about their schools’ passivity about antisemitism. Each was asked if the calls on campus for the murder of Jews were antisemitic, and each responded: “it depends on the context.”

Why would any Jewish parents then allow their kids to attend these schools? I’d be pleased to term it a “mystery”; but it is no mystery, it is a horrible passivity — not even the (understandable) dismissal of danger as statistically remote, but something finally much worse — a sort of death wish.

That Jewish parents send their Jewish children to institutions which allow, encourage, and so ensure, antisemitism is an act of sacrifice. It is an endorsement of the majoritarian’s right to oppress the Jews, in the hope the gift will forestall further violence. For the Warsaw Jews it was the surrender of their guns, in the Ivy League, the offer of our children.

These institutions offer Jew-baiting as an extra-curricular activity. What possible benefit could our children derive there which would offset the trauma of their abandonment?

The beleaguered Jewish student there can either embrace passivity as a necessary survival strategy, or — horribly more likely — march with the antisemites calling for the eradication of Israel — an apostasy which would spare them as little as did the Warsaw surrender of firearms.

Jew Hatred isn’t caused by Jews.

The Chanukah celebrants at Bondi Beach, the dancing kids on October 7, the Ivy Jews sheltering in Hillel, neither these nor those they’re persecuted for resembling did anything to inspire hatred. That something in their DNA, appearance, or religious beliefs excuses their persecution is delusional. It’s not a hatred of Jews, but a love of hatred.

Is antisemitic speech and violence a Hate Crime? All crime is hate crime; there is no such thing as Love Crime. To mete out justice based on the ethnic or religious status of the victim or the prejudices of the perpetrator is insanity. We’re all human beings as equal in our legitimate desires for safety as we should be in accountability for our acts.

Jews have been persecuted for 2,000 years because we were defenseless. Since the establishment of the Jewish State, we’ve been reviled because we asserted our right to exist, independent of permission.

Moses fled Egyptian luxury not alone because he slew the taskmaster, but because he was denounced by the Jew he saved. He was heartbroken. After the appearance of Moses, most of the Jews in the Torah plead, scheme, and betray in order to return to Egypt, which is to say, to the security of slavery.

Slavery is the sole possible state of that which the liberal mind celebrates as “equality”. To aspire to it is not merely wrong, it is immoral. For, in preferring subjugation to self-determination, we not only choose for ourselves, but provide example to those groups of which we are members.

My Brown graduate niece, now 43, wears a Free Palestine t-shirt; and the Jews of the world’s largest Jewish city have just elected an antisemite mayor.

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Harvard University has no shame

By David Mamet

On Erev-Chanukah, last Saturday, we neighborhood Jews gathered, as planned, to light candles. But the day began with the slaughter on Bondi Beach, and ended with the murders of our Community members, the Reiners.

We were grieving, which is to say, in a state of Cognitive Dissonance. Nothing made sense save that nothing made sense. The last thing we wanted to do was to abandon the safety of our grief for a “religious celebration”. Then an elder explained the Miracle of Chanukah.

We all knew that the desecrated Temple had to be rededicated, that the resanctification required illumination of the sacred lamps. We knew, from childhood, that there was Only Enough Oil to burn for one day, but that the Jews lit the lamps and they burned for the required eight days. We all knew the persistence of the lamps was a miracle; but the Rabbis wrote that the true miracle was not the length of the lamps’ illumination, but that the Jews, knowing the oil was insufficient, lit the lamps in any case. As commanded.

After we heard the story, and, still grieving, we lit the lamps.

As Chanukah is, finally, the Festival of Lights, I’ll end with this note: in Sydney, at the Great Synagogue, I was in line, waiting to be frisked, and a man behind me said, “Aren’t you David Mamet?” I admitted I was. He wished me an easy fast, and a Good Inscription in the Book of Life, and said he was honoured I’d come to his shul.

I asked his name, and he told me. He was the shul’s Rabbi. The line had moved up, and the armed guard saw us talking and asked, “Rabbi, shall I just pass him in…?” “Nah,” the Rabbi said, “frisk him.”

Happy Chanukah.

In February, in response to Vice-President Vance’s criticism of the British State’s suppression of free speech, Sir Keir managed to get his bit out: “We’ve had free speech for a very, very long time in the United Kingdom, and it will last for a very, very long time […] I’m very proud of our history there.” Is he very though?

Is it pride he feels when he looks at the history of the Paul Chambers case, for instance, when the CPS, under his leadership as Director of Public Prosecutions, pursued a young man through the Magistrates, Crown, and High Courts, for a harmless piece of flippancy, an obvious joke about blowing up an airport, which none of the relevant authorities took seriously? If there’s any truth to the Guardian’s report of his personal intervention to continue fighting Chambers’s appeal “to save face” (and it is inconceivable he wasn’t aware of the matter) then he must have had in mind a different pride, and a different history.

But his answer flew well enough, and the discussion moved on. A few months later, in Scotland, the question was again raised in front of the US President. Dusting his cuff and pulling a grin as if in dad-like apology for an overused joke, he parried with, “We’ve had free speech for a very, very long time here, so we’re very proud about that and we’ll be protecting it,” before being interrupted. Indoors later that day, he again stuck to the script — “Free speech in this country has been [sic] for a very long time, and we’re very very proud of it, we will protect it forever.”

The fourth outing of the very-very-long-time-very-very-proud defense came at Chequers the other week. “It’s one of the founding values of the United Kingdom, and we protect it jealously and fiercely, and always will, and we will bear down on any limits on free speech,” he began. And to conclude, “We have had free speech in this country for a very long time and we will always protect it.” But sandwiched between these two pieces of now familiar pabulum was something with a new flavor: “I draw a limit between free speech and the speech of those that want to peddle paedophilia and suicide social media to children.” The Paedo Pivot. They should teach it at Bar school.

Over the two months since Trump’s Scottish visit, something in the order of 2,000 people were arrested in the UK for online communications offenses, including, most publicly, Graham Linehan. In an attempt to deflect the backlash from the comedian’s detention, the PM said the police should “focus on the most serious issues”, while the Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley put out a statement asserting that it’s not the police’s fault as they have no choice but to investigate reported hate crimes, and the law needs to be changed.

Clearly, then, there is defensive anxiety among the new Establishment about restrictions on Free Speech in the UK. But whose fault is it, and what can be done?

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The flaws in the Lucy Letby case

By Adam King

My own experience of the senior ranks of the police, which comes mainly from defending officers in their disciplinary tribunals, often for speech transgressions of one kind or another, is that the Force has been more thoroughly captured by extreme progressive zealotry than any comparable institution. For evidence, peruse almost any of the College of Policing’s recent output.

The Hate Crime Operational Guidance is, as you might imagine, representative. Turgid and internally inconsistent, it contains countless encouragements to go in hard on the likes of Linehan: “Positive action should be taken,” “Hate crimes should be treated as priority incidents,” “There are occasions where an immediate response by a police officer may not be appropriate or possible… Where such delays occur, a supervisor should consider the reasons given and set out a clear plan for how and when the incident will be responded to.” At the same time, a light dusting of uninformative references to “proportionality” provides plausible deniability.

But the only important message — that officers have wide discretion and must use their common sense — is buried among little nudges as to how that discretion should be exercised: “Where the evidence justifies it, taking positive action is preferable, but the decision to arrest is always a matter for officers, and should be based on the evidence available at the time.” Taking all this stuff together, the thrust of the guidance is clear: if a member of a protected group alleges hate crime, and you don’t get stuck in immediately, you’ll have to answer for it.

So Commissioner Rowley is right to say the Guidance could usefully be amended, but he’s wrong to imply that officers have no choice but to investigate. When an allegation contains no crime, as in the recent Linehan arrest, or when it does but the crime is trivial, the police need make no arrest. Indeed, generally they must make no arrest, because for an arrest to be lawful it has to be “necessary” — a law the police routinely ignore. Most victims of unnecessary arrests don’t have the money to sue. Linehan, funded by the Free Speech Union, is an exception.

But the UK’s status as global number-one free-speech laughing stock does not rest solely, or even mainly, on the volume of arrests, but rather on the substantial sentences of imprisonment that can follow these arrests — of which my former client Lucy Connolly’s is perhaps the best-known example. Although I write this with her knowledge and consent, my role as her advocate is over. How, then, did she end up spending over a year in prison, for posting and then deleting after less than four hours, “Mass deportation now. Set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care. While you’re at it, take the treacherous government and politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist, so be it.”

The simplest answer, as her less forgiving critics would have it, is that she pleaded guilty to Stirring Up Racial Hatred, and accepted the Crown’s case that she was guilty of both the more serious version of the offense — s.19(1)(b) intention to stir up — and the highest categorization on the sentencing guidelines — intention to incite serious violence. That gave a starting point of three years’ imprisonment before the reduction for a guilty plea. And then the Court of Appeal rejected her claim not to have properly understood what she put her signature to when accepting an intention to incite serious violence. So what, really, is the problem?

Well, even if she had understood that she was signing up to be sentenced for an intention to incite serious violence (and I have no wish, and no need, to relitigate that here), her agreement would have been made in the same spirit as her admitted agreement to be sentenced on the basis of an intention to stir up racial hatred: namely, that she didn’t think she would win if she argued it in front of a judge, and she didn’t want to risk losing any of her guilty plea discount by trying.

To be clear, she said in the police interview that she “didn’t intend to cause hate or racial issues”, and despite waiving privilege in the Court of Appeal, there was no evidence of her ever having said to anyone that she had in fact had any criminal intention. Rather, her decision to accept the Crown’s allegation of intent was really a predictive judgment call, a guess at the inferences a judge would draw— and one about which both she, and the lawyer who was advising her at the time, may well have been right.

So, on one view, the problem isn’t so much the action of this particular court in this particular case — which was, after all, presented with an apparent acceptance to be sentenced on the Crown’s case with no argument about intention. But rather it is the broader political climate in which a defendant in Mrs Connolly’s position can make an accurate judgment, on accurate legal advice, that a judge will probably decide that her tweet demonstrated, to the criminal standard of “sure”, an intention to incite serious violence. For my own part, I just can’t see it.

Certainly, there were elements of the proceedings which, in my opinion, might have been different, and might then have made some difference. The Crown could have split the allegation into two counts to at least give her the option of putting to a jury, rather than a judge, the issue of whether she even intended to stir up racial hatred (let alone incite serious violence). And the decision to refuse her bail on 22 August 2024, two weeks after the riots had stopped, was, in my view, unjustifiable. Nevertheless, she might still have made the same decisions regarding her plea, and might still have been right to do so.

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The Right is coming for free speech

By Adam King

The trouble is, to the Progressive mind the success of multiculturalism isn’t just good, it’s the highest good, and its failure the worst ill. All decent people, therefore, will carefully avoid saying or doing anything that even might push things in the wrong direction. And so anyone who does take that risk is not a decent person, and can only really have been intending the bad outcome: if you don’t want the worst imaginable thing to happen, you don’t take the slightest chance of bringing it about. It’s only a short distance away from “silence is violence”: evil must be fought, not ignored, and certainly not diced with. This, in any event, seems to me the most likely chain of reasoning, unconscious or otherwise, of those that believe Lucy Connolly deserved her 31-month sentence.

But it’s not generally fair, nor conducive to the aim of restoring free speech in the UK, to simply blame the judges. Of course the judiciary is more Left-wing than the national average. Even Tony Blair thought so. But it’s the same in all professions. They’re Gen-X-ers and young boomers who attended top universities in the late 20th century. It would be astonishing if it were otherwise. But on the criminal side at least (I make no comment about immigration tribunals), they tend not to be activists. Most of their work has no political valence to it, and the culture in their corridors, so far as I’m familiar with it, is to try very hard to be boringly fair. They don’t always succeed, but politics basically isn’t their game.

It would be nice if the judiciary were more politically representative of the people they serve, if only for optics’ sake. But if your free speech laws cannot withstand a wave of Left-wingers on the bench, then those laws aren’t up to much.

So if the law isn’t currently up to it, how should it be changed? First, section 127 Communications Act 2003, which criminalizes “grossly offensive” messages sent privately even where the recipient is unbothered, delighted or amused, must be repealed: we should be free to send electronically anything we are permitted to say in person. This outdated offense, with its absurd privileging of “a public electronic communications network”, has no place in modern society.

Secondly, Stirring Up Racial Hatred needs a refresh. As another former client Jamie Michael discovered to his detriment, all that’s required — at least for an arrest and prosecution, although not in his case a conviction — is a spirited objection to illegal immigration with a couple of borderline-insulting words thrown in. The 1976 expansion of the offense, to include words that are merely “likely” to stir up racial hatred, now has too great a chilling effect. After all, there arguably is a good chance that some racist somewhere might see your punchy anti-immigration post and feel inspired to a shade more hatred than they were feeling already. And that is now enough for the police to put your door in.

Whereas common sense and proportionality were once inherent features of the system at every level – before the communality of the rules of political engagement, including the conventions around free speech, had been fractured — now they might be absent until — as in Jamie’s case — they are effortfully injected by legal argument in the Crown Court about the jurisprudence on the right to freedom of expression. Safer, then, to just keep your mouth shut on the most significant political issue of our age.

The curious fact that both sides in the culture war offer the same answer about where “the line” should be drawn — speech that incites real-world violence — shows that it is no answer at all. Causation is a quicksilver concept, which lawyers, like philosophers, struggle to delineate. Are you morally responsible, and should you be held criminally liable, for a bad outcome if you can foresee that your words could make that outcome more likely?

If the outcome is bad enough — like terrorism — the answer is sometimes yes. That is why, in those rare cases, we criminalize the mere expression of support. The modern State, though, now seems to be taking a de facto similar attitude to expressions of political opinion that have the potential to influence others in a way that threatens the wellbeing of its sacred cows. But that is not terrorism, and should not be illegal.

Obviously, the less racial hatred there is, the better. The law can, and does, seek to reduce it. But to try to silence millions of citizens who want to share their views on immigration, despite in some cases lacking the verbal dexterity required to avoid rude words and other tripwires, is a terrible own goal.

Starmer reminded us, in his conference speech this week, of the mid-century roots of his socialist convictions: his father’s frustration that the nation did not respect him because he worked with his hands. But the frustrations of the modern working class, certainly on immigration, seem to be of less concern – acknowledged, now and then, but always with a disapproving caveat: “This party is proud of our flags, yet if they are painted alongside graffiti telling a Chinese takeaway owner to ‘go home’…”

Suppressed views, like suppressed emotions, tend to erupt with great force. If disputes over our nation’s future are to be conducted peacefully through debate and not violently on the streets, speech must be free. And if Keir Starmer wants that to last a very, very long time, as he claims, he must act now, and make us all very, very proud.

And there’s more. Ostensibly introduced for those victims of hate crimes too intimidated to speak to the police directly, there will now be designated “third-party reporting centres” for accusations of hateful crime, including one in a Glasgow sex shop. Snitch on someone you dislike and pick up a dildo at the same time — isn’t modern life wonderful?

Also accompanying the introduction of the Act has been an infantilising and much-derided publicity campaign, featuring a ginger “Hate Monster” strongly reminiscent of a Sesame Street character, and who is supposed to represent “that feeling some people get when they are frustrated and angry and take it out on others, because they feel like they need to show that they are better than them. In other words, they commit a hate crime”. Given the vagueness of this characterisation, upon first encountering the Hate Monster, I myself probably committed one — in imagination, at least — both upon the Monster and whatever lanyard-bedecked zealot invented him.

But not everyone feels the same. First Minister Humza Yousaf is an enthusiast for the new piece of muppetry, including its application in the home, and thinks that perception-based recording of non-crime hate incidents gives the police “an idea of where there might be spikes in hatred”. Perhaps he pictures the police station from Taggart, with glum-faced officers putting red pins into a wall map featuring J.K. Rowling’s house.

Growing up in Scotland as the offspring of sassenachs, I have certainly been made aware of the presence of spikes of hatred at various times in my life; but strangely enough, animus against the English does not figure heavily in defences of the policies. Instead, the focus is upon more fashionable victims. You may not understand what a non-binary person actually is, let alone be able to summon up enough negative emotion to persecute one, but according to the Scottish government such people are sufficiently threatened as to justify their specific inclusion in the Bill. Also included under the characteristic of transgender identity are people who “cross-dress”: good news for the many Scotswomen who wear trousers, as otherwise females don’t get much of a look-in, with sex not mentioned as a protected characteristic at all.

Meanwhile, another social tinderbox allegedly waiting to explode, according to policymakers, is widespread resentment against that 0.018% of the population “with variations in sex characteristics” — colloquially known as intersex people, and who will also be specially protected under the new law. If you didn’t know any better, you might conclude that several aspects of the legislation are a frivolous distraction from the country’s real problems.

Worse, you might infer that all of this is implicitly a cudgel with which to bash people who are poor and/or haven’t been to the University of St Andrews, as is heavily suggested by another aspect of the “Don’t Feed Hate” ad campaign: namely, its focus upon “young men aged 18-30” as being “most likely to commit hate crime”. In particular, we are told to watch out for “those from socially excluded communities who are heavily influenced by their peers”, and “who have deep-rooted feelings of being socially and economically disadvantaged, combined with ideas about white-male entitlement”. In other words, if you are a young white male, being influenced by your peers is bad (as opposed to being influenced by a big ginger muppet, one assumes); and your poverty and social exclusion are now reduced to mere “feelings”. Still, it seems that some feelings are taken more seriously by the Scottish ruling classes than others.

Many commentators are concerned that the whole Act will chill legitimate free speech, either via actual criminal sanctions or via misinterpretations of the law by police and others; and there are particular worries about speech that is critical of religion, either of the traditional or transactivist kinds. But the smooth-tongued rainbow mandarins paid to dictate equality policy to a mostly vacant-eyed political class have told everyone to take a deep breath and relax. As the chief executive of Equality Network in Scotland Rebecca Crowther soothingly told Sky News: “This legislation is not going to catch people online saying things that I might disagree with, that you might disagree with, things that might upset me, things that might upset others in the community… What it does legislate against is when that freedom of speech strays into something that is abusive, that could cause fear and alarm, and that also incites hatred or incites people to act on that hatred.”  Meanwhile Yousaf himself has said that he has “full confidence” that the police will look beyond “vexatious” complaints.

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What is Judith Butler afraid of?

By Kathleen Stock

But what this trite sort of response obviously ignores is that, as social norms change, it is increasingly difficult for people to distinguish between that which is merely disagreeable and upsetting, and that which is genuinely hateful and abusive. It is an irony of the present situation that so many seem to think that biology is socially constructed but that the meaning of hatred is natural and fixed. In fact, what counts as an adequate expression of a particular emotion is at least partly culturally determined, and these days the category of hatred seems to be a lot more expansive than it used to be. Previously, its presence was indicated by otherwise random-looking outbursts of violence towards outgroups, and the use of aggressive slurs. In present day Scotland, however, it seems detectable from saying things like “choosing to identify as ‘non-binary’ is as valid as choosing to identify as a cat” — a recent statement by the Conservative MSP Murdo Fraser, subsequently recorded by police as a non-crime hate incident, a verdict he now intends to contest in court.

The wording of the Act tries to solve this problem by referring to what a “reasonable person” would think: so that, for instance, it is a necessary condition of committing a stirring-up offence that either one “behaves in a manner that a reasonable person would consider to be threatening or abusive”, or “communicates to another person material that a reasonable person would consider to be threatening or abusive” — and, in doing so, intends to stir up hatred against a protected group.

In this formulation, there is a pleasing echo of the Scottish Enlightenment and its emphasis on the tempering of emotion with more impartial rationality. For instance, despite thinking of moral judgement as mainly a matter of feelings not reason, David Hume still placed emphasis on the importance of “steady and general points of view”; meaning that we should not just blindly sympathise with what others are feeling but also apply rational discernment to get rid of prejudice and partisanship. Meanwhile, Adam Smith, another famous sentimentalist about morality, placed great emphasis not just on imaginatively simulating the feelings of others, but also upon taking the more distanced perspective of an “impartial spectator” in order to hone judgements of approval or disapproval about those feelings.

Suggested reading

Free speech is still worth fighting for

By Jonathan Sumption

Equally, though, both Hume and Smith were clear that you can only exercise reasoned judgement about the aptness or otherwise of another person’s emotional state if you are also adequately informed about what he or she is getting aerated about in the first place. And yet, this is precisely the level of information lacking these days from the average person’s perception of things like “abusiveness” or “hatred”. Instead, large numbers of citizens have been socially conditioned to take the barest presence of formerly standard features of ordinary discourse — expressed scepticism about certain popular values; unfamiliarity with middle-class speech codes; demurrals from progressive articles of faith, and so on — as automatically implying a hateful attitude, and to proceed to the nearest third-party reporting centre on that basis.

A reasonable person wouldn’t have gone along with any of this, and yet in Scotland crazily myopic and illiberal measures continue to be waved through, with stunning condescension on the part of their smug originators. In other words, there’s no use appealing to what some hypothetical reasonable person would think, when there appear to be no such people in the vicinity. They’ve probably all gone down the sex shop to report J.K. Rowling for saying homosexuality is a thing. It’s almost as if these people hate us.

Unfortunately, it’s a correction that many people are probably never going to see — or if they do, they won’t believe it.

Like many stories of its oeuvre, this one began on Twitter, when Richardson’s godmother Lesa Pamplin claimed in a series of since-deleted posts that the young volleyball player had been subject to racist abuse throughout the game: “My Goddaughter is the only black starter for Dukes [sic] volleyball team,” she wrote. “While playing yesterday, she was called a [n-word] every time she served. She was threatened by a white male that told her to watch her back going to the team bus. A police officer had to be put by their bench.”

Pamplin hadn’t been at the game herself, but the claim was incendiary. The story was soon picked up by mainstream outlets, which treated the alleged harassment — and discovery of its perpetrator — as verified fact. From USA Today: “Brigham Young fan banned after directing racial slurs toward Duke volleyball player.” The Washington Post: “BYU bans fan, relocates volleyball match after racist slurs, threats.” The New York Times: “Racial Slur During College Volleyball Game Leads to Fan Suspension.”

Additionally, readers were warned that failing to believe this story, or even asking questions about it, was simply not an option. An op-ed from USA Today columnist Mike Freeman declared any doubts about Richardson’s veracity to be a “Right-wing conspiracy theory”, like QAnon or Pizzagate or 9/11 trutherism. Ditto the suggestion that she might have made a mistake: “The other conspiracy theory is that she misheard the word. That is a word you don’t mishear. You certainly don’t mishear it more than once.”

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JK Rowling sees through her enemies

By Kat Rosenfield

And yet, despite Freeman’s insistence to the contrary, not only is this a word that people do mishear, it has been only a year since the last high-profile incident in which someone misheard it in a similar context: in a raucous crowd at a sporting event, and, yes, more than once. In this case, the culprit was a man trying to get the attention of the Rockies mascot, whose name is “Dinger.”

That Richardson mistook another word for that word seems more likely than the alternative: that she fabricated the whole thing. But either way, it didn’t happen — and a responsible media class should never have reported otherwise so confidently, so soon. At the time, nobody present at the game had corroborated Richardson’s allegations, despite pleas from BYU’s athletic director for anyone who’d witnessed the incident to come forward. BYU and Duke athletic officials moved into the stands after the first alleged shout, but neither saw nor heard anything amiss. A review of video and audio footage also turned up nothing, and while the fan who was originally identified and permanently banned from BYU games was found in the footage, he wasn’t shouting slurs; he was sitting and playing with his phone. (BYU has unbanned him and apologised for the error.)

One potential solution to this problem, perhaps, would be a moratorium on teams with names or mascots ending in “-ger” (the BYU team is called The Cougars). Another would be to assume that in the year 2022, a person screaming something indecipherable in front of a crowd of thousands is in all likelihood not shouting a racial slur.

That is not to say that racism in American society has ceased to exist; on a systemic level, disparities continue, and the country still has work to do to level the playing field. But on an interpersonal one, America has never been less racist than it is today. A good proxy for how Americans feel about diversity on this front is the approval rating for interracial marriage, which was just 4% when the question was first polled in 1958. Last year, that number was 94%.

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MeToo killed Game of Thrones

By Kat Rosenfield

And the brand of racism that involves using the n-word, let alone in public, let alone in front of thousands of people, is simply (and happily) not an accepted part of our social landscape — as evidenced by the immediate mass condemnation and punishment of anyone even alleged to have indulged in it. Not only can we safely assume that most people feel no yearning to shout racial slurs at sporting events, we might also assume that the handful of troglodytes who do will nevertheless have the good sense to to avoid indulging that urge, given the consequences.

It’s a riff on the old medical wisdom: when you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. And when you hear a word with a hard “-ger” sound being shouted in the BYU stands, think cougars, not, well, you know.

But in our present moment, thinking “zebras” is what everyone does, and it’s not hard to understand why. Within the past few years, it seems like the folks who drive the national discourse — the cable news hosts, the talking heads, the journalists on every beat — have all coalesced around the narrative that when it comes to race in America, things are worse than ever.

The story goes like this: underneath the veneer of polite American society lies a deep and roiling river of racial resentment, barely contained at the best of times and always on the verge of spilling over. According to this narrative, that resentment is the only logical cause of every toxic, awkward, or otherwise negative interaction between a white person and a non-white person. Asking where someone is from? Racist. Working-class economic anxiety? Racist. Being unfriendly? Racist, obviously, but then again, so is being too friendly.

The idea that American race relations are bad and getting worse has been fuelled in many cases by legitimate tragedies: the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown by police in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014; the murder of George Floyd in 2020. But rather than seeing something like Floyd’s death as a problem of police abuse, and one that might be solved by police reform, we were told that it was representative of the country’s true character. When Derek Chauvin put his knee on Floyd’s neck, he was only making manifest the racist hatred that simmers inside all of us.

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And if you assume the ubiquitous presence of that kind of hate, then no alleged hate crime, no matter how over-the-top, is too outlandish to be believed — even if the allegations themselves are unsubstantiated or ambiguous. The hoofbeats you hear? Zebras, not horses. When Jussie Smollett claimed to have been assaulted on the street at 3am, in one of the most liberal cities in the country, on one of the coldest nights of the year, by two Trump voters who just happened to be carrying a noose in their back pockets, it was interpreted as a sign how bad things really were. When a sixth grader alleged that she’d been pinned down and had her dreadlocks forcibly cut by three white classmates, it was the same. When a journalist accidentally said “Nakers” (a spoonerism of “Knicks” and “Lakers”) while reporting on the death of Kobe Bryant, the internet went wild: obviously this was a pathetic attempt to get away with saying the n-word, as we had been reliably assured all white Americans are constantly yearning to do. When a 15 year-old in a MAGA hat smiled awkwardly at the guy chanting and banging a drum in his face, we knew we were witnessing an act of racial aggression. And when a looped string appeared — in a public park, or in a NASCAR garage — we knew, without a doubt, that it was a noose.

This is what happens to a society that has been primed to assume the worst — and then, when the worst turns out not to be the case, to simply point to the assumption itself as evidence that things are dire. When the “noose” hung in NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace’s garage turned out to be just a pull rope, the Washington Post scolded readers that this was no reason to feel relieved: being glad that this wasn’t a hate crime just indicated a state of “denial about the dreary state of the nation”. Don’t you dare imagine that things are getting better. Don’t you dare imagine progress has been made. Maybe this cry of “wolf!” turned out to be baloney, but the fact that you believed there was a wolf tells you everything you need to know.

Needless to say, it is not good for a society to exist in a state of such constant catastrophising vigilance for signs of racial resentment. Amid our obsessive fear of fake news, this is a particularly insidious sort of misinformation; it is the reason why, for instance, liberal Americans grossly overestimate the number of unarmed black men killed every year by police. The actual number in 2019 was somewhere between 10 and 30, but fully 53% of surveyed liberals assumed it was over 1,000, while 22% estimated the number at 10,000 or more. It is also why, even as Americans across the board report feeling good about diversity and warmth for their black countrymen, we nevertheless believe that other people’s racism is bad and getting worse.

But the worst harm is something more basic: it is bad for black Americans to be unreasonably terrified that they’ll be hate-crimed every time they leave the house. It is wrong to instil fear and pessimism and panic for the sake of clicks. And telling people that many of their fellow Americans secretly hate them and wish them harm, when this is not in fact the case, is morally reprehensible.

One of my earliest political memories is of the minister in my grandparents’ church starting the service with a prayer for striking miners. A few years later, at the Glasgow Comic Art Convention, I remember Alan Grant, the Scottish co-writer of Judge Dredd and Batman, exhorting the audience not to pay the poll tax. This was also the era in which a fictional, unemployed, ranting Glaswegian with a bandage wrapped around his head became a beloved national symbol.

Indeed, in the 80s and 90s, a freewheeling attitude of utter contempt for the high and mighty seemed as Scottish as a Tunnock’s Tea Cake. Yet on my first visit home from Texas since pandemic chaos destabilised the world, I detected a very different mood in the air.

This was the first time I had been in Scotland since the government at Holyrood had passed a law making it illegal to utter wicked words in the home, the enforcement of which will necessarily involve family members denouncing the sinners among them to the authorities. I had missed Nicola Sturgeon’s daily briefings on TV, although I was aware that when the BBC had proposed to broadcast them less often, and perhaps not in full, there had been “widespread criticism”, while a petition to keep them on air had attracted over 50,000 signatures.

Meanwhile, I found myself receiving regular moral instruction from the government in the form of signs admonishing me against uttering wicked words on the train, letting my dog shit in the street, or conversely, letting my dog hunt hares; minimal unit pricing for alcohol had also been in place for three years. That finger wagging from the pulpit energy was back: it was as if the Scottish government feared that an irredeemably sinful people might at any moment erupt in spasms of hatred aimed at both humans and speedy animals with long ears.

What happened to the Scotland I remember? It was as if, by voting the nationalists into power, my fellow countrymen had accidentally resurrected Calvinism in woke form. The national poet wouldn’t have liked this much, I thought — and not simply because, were Robert Burns to return today, he would be cancelled in seconds both for his womanising, and his efforts to get a job as a bookkeeper on a slave plantation in Jamaica.

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A deep disdain for authoritarian piety runs through Burns’ poetry, informed not only by his rebellious temperament but also his direct experience of being denounced from the pulpit by the moral guardians of his day. Most famously, in Holy Willie’s Prayer he satirised a self-satisfied Calvinist believer who thanks God for making him one of the elect and justifies his lustful nature as a “fleshly thorn” intended by God to prevent him from becoming too perfect. Simultaneously he prays in a most unforgiving fashion for the destruction of his enemies for the same sins. Thanks to Burns, Holy Willie became archetypal, and I have often thought about his 21^st century equivalents while walking around Edinburgh. For Burns, however, it was personal: the man he mocked was no abstraction but a certain William Fisher, an elder in Burns’ own parish, and the poem was so libellous that he circulated it in private.

But it wasn’t just preachy, vindictive hypocrites that earned Burns’ mockery. In To a Louse he describes in loving detail the journey of a louse to the top of a lady’s bonnet in full view of everyone but her. Extracted from the poem, the famous lines “O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us/To see oursels as others see us!” sound like a prayer for wisdom and humility, but read in the context of the preceding verses it is hard to escape Burns’s glee at puncturing his neighbour’s self-satisfaction. Indeed, Burns sought to undermine just about everything that Calvinist worthies presented to him as sombre and sacred; in Tam O’Shanter, a drunkard’s horse outruns a horde of spirits, while in his Address To the Deil, Burns suggests that even “Auld Hornie” himself might have a shot at redemption if he would only change his ways.

Would the religious authorities of Burns’s day have accused him of “stirring up hatred” had such a vaguely worded law existed at the time? It seems likely. And would Burns, so aware of the lines he crossed in his own verse that he circulated some of it secretly, have felt at ease in a country where friends and family are encouraged to inform on each other for things said in their own homes? It seems unlikely.

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Yet many Scots do appear to be comfortable in such an environment, and place great trust in the authorities to always do the right thing, to adjudicate with wisdom over what can and cannot be said in private as well as in public. The more I thought about it, the more my experience growing up in Scotland in the 80s and 90s seemed anomalous. Perhaps the virulently anti-authority strain in the national character was especially pronounced back then not because of some innate aspect of the Scottish soul but rather because the country was ruled by an indifferent Conservative government in London that had very little support north of the border.

Between Thatcher’s election in 1979 and her resignation in 1990, she managed to alienate large swathes of Scottish voters, and the number of Conservative MPs in Scotland dropped from 22 to 10. When Alan Grant took to the podium to inveigh against the Poll Tax in front of a bunch of youthful comic fans, it had already been in place for a year longer than in England. Mrs. Thatcher had decided to experiment with it first in the test lab of Scotland, where she wasn’t too bothered about alienating voters.

It’s not that all Scottish people were contemptuous of all authority; but many of them were contemptuous of that authority. After all, it’s easy to be anti-establishment when you have nothing to gain from the establishment. Once the SNP came to power, that changed. There was a different power in the land, and many people identified with it, agreed with it, and benefited from it. Meanwhile the Brexit vote and the omnishambles of Boris Johnson’s leadership has made it easy for the SNP to direct that caustic, skeptical, questioning attitude southwards.

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It was easy, too, for Burns to hate the establishment. When he wrote those poems mocking the powerful and attacking hypocrites, he — a poor farmer and notorious fornicator — was completely alienated from the powers that stood over him. But what if he had lived in today’s Scotland, where a poet of his stature would not need to think about moving to Jamaica to earn money, but might instead be offered a cushy professorship at a state-funded university, prestigious seats on cultural committees and access to funding from Creative Scotland?

I doubt that even then he’d bite his tongue. Following the success of his first collection, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, Burns moved to Edinburgh where he was feted by the literary elites of his day. In this environment his jabs at preachers and rural overlords were about as edgy as attacking Trump in the pages of The Guardian, and he began to focus on collecting and reworking traditional ballads instead of insulting  the church elders who annoyed him.

But he still enjoyed provoking the sacred cows of his new audience, too. His poem, A Dream, which Burns wrote in response to a particularly unctuous encomium to George III not only disparaged the king but included the suggestion that Bonnie Prince Charlie might have done a better job. To the enlightened Edinburgh readership of Burns’s day this was much more ‘problematic’ than whatever derision he aimed at rural ministers: support for the vanquished Stuarts was not only politically unacceptable but regarded as an uncultivated, lower class belief. Burns in fact had written it before moving to the big city, but he kept on publishing it in every edition of Poems, even when it would have been in his interests to leave it out.

As the literary scholar Carol McGuirk observes, Burns was a man “stimulated by prohibitions”. He would find plenty to stimulate him in Scotland today. The love poet, the man of the people, the composer of odes to haggis — I like that poet. But the Burns I find most inspiring is the annoying guy, the rebel who doesn’t trust overbearing Calvinist types, and who doesn’t pander to self-satisfied elites, even when it’s in his best interest to do so. It is those qualities that make him a poet not only of his time, or more generally of ‘all times’, but specifically for our times.

The Smollett trial has been worth following for a few reasons. The first, if least important, is the pure entertainment value of the story that Smollett initially told police. For those who have forgotten, the former actor — famously dubbed “Juicy Smollé” by the comedian Dave Chappelle — originally said he was attacked by Trump supporters wearing ski-masks, in the integrated heart of Chicago, at 2am on the coldest day of the year.

The details were even more absurd than the big picture. Smollett claimed that after leaving his condo to buy a sandwich, he was approached by two white men who recognised him from the television show Empire, a hip-hop musical with a 61% black audience. The men assaulted him, tied a noose around his neck, and doused him with bleach, all while call him homophobic and racist slurs and shouting “This is MAGA country!” Per Smollett’s initial report, he heroically fought both off his attackers (“I hit his ass BACK!”), and escaped to his building with a noose around his neck and the hoagie still clasped tightly in one of his hands.

Of course, as was obvious from the beginning, none of this was true. The alleged “MAGA country” area of city-centre Chicago went 83% for Hillary Clinton in 2016. The real perpetrators of the “assault” turned out to be a pair of Smollett’s gym buddies from Nigeria, one of whom, we learned at trial, used to accompany Smollett on drug-fuelled excursions to gay bathhouses. The brothers testified that Smollett had paid them $3,500 to “fake beat him up,” call him slurs, and make a MAGA reference, allegedly so that the actor could garner public sympathy. The hoax took place early in the morning because Smollett’s flight to Chicago that evening had been delayed.

What is remarkable, in retrospect, is just how seriously Smollett’s story was taken. In a famous, widely circulated tweet, then-Senator Kamala Harris tweeted that the attack on Smollett was an “attempted modern day lynching”, a sentiment echoed by Senator Corey Booker. President Trump condemned the “horrible” attack. Even today, after Smollett’s story has definitively fallen apart, he has a handful of defenders. On Wednesday, Black Lives Matter released a statement in support of the actor, saying “We can never believe police… over a Black man who has been courageously present, visible, and vocal in the struggle for Black freedom”.

It is indisputable that Smollett’s allegations reflected what many mainstream Leftists believe about the United States. His claim was, very specifically, that “the attack” was an indictment of just how racist and homophobic America still is — he, a black gay man, had been assaulted in a liberal city just for existing. We hear this sort of thing often: that police violence is constant, that “systemic racism” and univariate “white privilege” plague the land, and that interracial crime is at near race-war levels. A famous and solidly-selling 2019 book was titled Open Season: The Legalized Genocide of Colored People.

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Content like this has an effect. The average “very liberal” American believes that between 1,000 and 10,000 unarmed black men are killed annually by police, when the actual number in 2020 was 17. However, beliefs like this are not based in reality. Only about 1,000 people of all races and sexes are killed by police in a typical year, and only around 250 of them are black. We may be overrepresented among those shot by police — 14% of the population vs. 25% of police shooting victims — but even this gap largely vanishes when one adjusts for black crime and police-encounter rates, which are about 2.5 times their white equivalents (no surprise, given that we are a younger and more urban population). And while violent interracial crimes involving blacks and whites are rare, accounting for only around three percent of serious crimes tracked by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, more than 80% of them are black-on-white.

While the incident Smollett claimed he survived would no longer be a metaphor for America, what actually happened arguably is. Many very high-profile incidents of ‘racial hate’ have unraveled similarly in recent years. The Covington Catholic affair, which was at first alleged to have involved a mob of white high school punks chanting “Build the Wall” at a Native American elder, turned out to have been a shouting match between the high-schoolers and a group of radical “Black Israelites,” which the Israelites started. Other incidents that turned out to be fake: Klansmen roaming the bucolic campus of Oberlin College, a white man harassing a black Georgia state representative in a grocery store, racists placing a “noose” in the garage of black NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace, Trump supporters tearing a hijab off of Yasmin Seweid on the New York subway, white bigots urinating on a young black girl in Grand Rapids, white men setting a biracial teenager on fire in Madison, and so on and so on. One could go back farther and add the Duke lacrosse case and the fabricated assault on Tawana Brawley.

Even these famous cases represent just a small sample from a larger data set. For my 2019 book Hate Crime Hoax, I spent several weeks conducting targeted searches of Internet research platforms for term sets like “hate crime hoax” and “hate crime: narrative collapse.” By the end of the research period, I had compiled a set of 409 cases, concentrated between 2014 and 2019, in which an undisputed claim (police report or story in national or reputable regional media outlet) was made about a serious incident involving racism or bias that was later utterly debunked.

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This data set, which is available to anyone who requests it, has now grown to include more than 1,000 incidents. Of course, no one claims that the majority of hate crime allegations, including allegations of lower-profile offences, turn out to be hoaxes. However, given that there are fewer than 7,000 hate crimes reported in the US in a typical year, and that only perhaps 10% of these receive the sort of coverage necessary to be included in my data set, the numbers just given are sizeable.

Although many modern allegations about the social effects of race are not true, Mr Smollett does possess one characteristic that is likely to protect him: he is rich. The power of the 1% has increased to a sometimes ridiculous extent within the United States in recent years. This real advantage has operated to Smollet’s benefit repeatedly throughout his legal ordeal. He has friends in high places too. CNN’s Don Lemon tipped Smollett off that the police were skeptical of his story. At one point, the Chicago DA’s office simply dropped all charges against him (they were later reinstated). Some friends and colleagues apparently still say that he is innocent; he may well work again one day. Smollett faces up to three years in jail, but he seems unlikely to ever go down into the bowels of CCJ as a convict. Expect instead the rich man’s sentence: probation or community service.

That’s why the British police model is often referred to as one of “policing by consent”. The service is run with the blessing and co-operation of the public, rather than as an arm of the state. We know that the police regularly walk into situations which most of us would instinctively avoid, often showing great courage in difficult situations. A YouGov poll in October suggested that the police in general are positively viewed by the public, with 65% saying they trust them and 31% saying they don’t. But recent scandals have taken a toll on the specific reputation of one force in particular: only 33% of the British public say that they trust the Metropolitan police (although the figure is higher among Londoners, at 57%).

The Met’s standing has been damaged by Sarah Everard’s abduction and murder by Met officer Wayne Couzens, and the disgraceful conduct of two Met officers at the scene of the 2020 murders of Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman. Much has been said about the need to root out so-called “bad apples” in the force, along with tackling persistent pockets of misogyny and racism. But our model of policing by consent faces another challenge. Recently, the police have been taking on powers that the bulk of the British public never asked for them to have.

What the public wants from the police — as a 2020 report from the Police Foundation think tank suggests — is pretty much what you’d expect: more visible policing on the street, and a focus on “sexual crime, violent crime, investigating serious crime, responding quickly to calls for help, tackling terrorism and taking action on organised crime”. In other words, we want the greatest energy focused on the crimes with the highest potential to devastate lives.

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Of course, as the Strategic Review of Policing in England and Wales — set up to shape a “long term strategic direction for the police service” — acknowledges, a lot of crime has migrated from the streets to electronic highways. Fraud and computer misuse now make up 44% of all crime in England and Wales. The number of police officers in England and Wales, however, fell by 20,000 between 2010 and 2019. The government has promised 20,000 additional police officers by 2023, more than half of whom have now been recruited. Ideally, this should contribute to a more efficient police force with an enhanced presence on the streets. Add in more rigorous safeguards against bias and corruption, promised in the aftermath of this reputationally disastrous year, and it doesn’t seem unreasonable to hope for a new, improved force.

But there’s a problem: recent, fuzzily-framed powers are taking our police in a direction that the public — and many officers — clearly do not want. Instead of patrolling the pavements, officers are increasingly encouraged to patrol the finer nuances of legitimate public debate. At a recent football match, Crystal Palace fans unveiled a large banner criticising the Saudi-backed takeover of Newcastle United. It featured a bearded character clearly depicting the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, along with a trenchant critique of Saudi Arabia’s shocking record on human rights. Croydon police promptly tweeted that they had “received a report of an offensive banner displayed by Crystal Palace fans” warning that “any allegations of racist abuse will be taken very seriously.” A later tweet from them thankfully confirmed that “no offences have been committed”, something which most sane people could have recognised with one glance.

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The argument over trans rights and women’s rights, too, has triggered lengthier but similarly doomed police investigations. One such case culminated in the bizarre 2019 prosecution of Miranda Yardley, a transsexual, for allegedly committing a transphobic hate crime online. The police investigation had been prompted by complaints against Yardley from a trans rights activist (who was not herself trans); the judge threw the case out after one day, awarding costs to the defendant. More recently, “gender-critical” feminist Marion Millar was charged under the Malicious Communications Act for potential hate crime. One of her offending tweets was reportedly a picture of a suffragette ribbon, which a complainant had argued was a noose. All charges were ultimately dropped. In both cases, the lengthy process to which the defendants were subjected was a punishment in itself.

Many of these threats to investigate, or unsuccessful charges, make the case that a “hate” crime has been committed — that is, an offence motivated by the plaintiff’s disability, race, religion, sexual orientation or gender identity. (Ordinary crimes, it seems, take an equal opportunities approach.) Hate crime carries an enhanced sentence, but at least — since it involves an actual crime — it is bound by certain legal definitions.

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Hate crime’s little brother is a sub-category called “non-crime hate incidents,” which can’t be prosecuted. For someone on the wrong end of an accusation, however, it can be very uncomfortable. Although the public collectively consents to the police holding power, we have little say as individuals in how that power is used over us. Police activity can be a factor in us losing our livelihoods or our liberty. And, despite not being a crime, a “non-crime hate incident” can go on your record and potentially show up on enhanced DBS checks. It might close off certain job opportunities. To better understand the offence, I turned to the West Yorkshire police website, where the Hate Crime Co-ordinator PC Emma Harrison explains it via video:

“A hate incident can be any incident that the victim or any other person perceives to have happened to a person as a result of their faith, their race, their sexual orientation, their disability. It doesn’t have to be a criminal offence. As the definition says it can be any incident, so it can be perhaps just the way that somebody looks at you or it might be something that somebody says to you that might upset you. It literally can be anything at all that you feel is there as a result of something about you, something very personal to you, it might be the colour of your skin, it might be a disability that you have, and it doesn’t even need to be a disability that can be seen.”

Around 120,000 such offences were recorded between 2014, when the College of Policing brought in the “non-crime hate incident” guidance, and 2019. Of course, it is often sensible for police to keep records of especially upsetting or threatening behaviour that nevertheless misses the threshold for criminal prosecution. But the net here is cast extremely wide, and could easily include a legitimate personal opinion that someone else simply doesn’t like. The “non-crime hate incident” exists entirely in the perception of the allegedly aggrieved party.

It seems chilling that “any incident” — including “perhaps just the way that somebody looks at you” — can potentially land an individual with a police record, not least because “looks” are frequently open to misinterpretation. If you are deemed the perpetrator, there is currently no evidential means by which you can overturn the ruling, save for an expensive and drawn-out judicial review. As the former director of public prosecutions, Ken Macdonald, wrote recently: “This power has real world consequences. We need hardly imagine what an HR manager would make of a job applicant with a police history of hate.”

A world in which self-described victims cannot be challenge is a dangerous one. The police’s desire to semaphore its wholehearted belief in the testimony of alleged victims, before investigating any actual evidence, was a key factor in the Met’s catastrophic Operation Midland. For nearly a year and a half, they pursued a highly energetic investigation into an alleged VIP sex ring on the basis of luridly fabricated evidence from the fantasist and paedophile Carl Beech, anonymised as “Nick”. His allegations resulted in the baseless persecution of both a former Home Secretary, Lord Brittan, and a former Chief of the Defence Staff, Lord Bramall.

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One of the glaring mistakes of that investigation occurred when one senior officer abandoned all rules of due process publicly to declare “Nick’s” allegations “credible and true”. They were both incredible and false. The assertion flew directly in the face of the eighth “general instruction” of British policing: that police should “refrain from even seeming to usurp the powers of the judiciary of avenging individuals or the State, and of authoritatively judging guilt and punishing the guilty.”

Leon Brittan died in 2015 without knowing his name had been cleared. The usual apologies were made by Dame Cressida Dick. And yet the same principle of “guilty if accused” has somehow been allowed to spread quietly in the thicket of “non-crime hate incidents.”

It is a tenet of our democracy that other people are allowed to say things with which we do not agree, and might even find offensive. The mission creep of the UK police force — which now risks effectively handing out police records to a growing pool of law-abiding citizens — is worrisome not only for the public at large, but also for the force itself. And it comes at a bad time: in what should be serious cause for concern, the October YouGov poll mentioned earlier also found that more people (48%) were now “unconfident” of the police’s ability to solve crime in their local area than were “confident” (43%).

If the general public sees more individuals being hounded and investigated for opinions which many of them may hold, while the conviction rate for high-harm offences such as knife crime and rape remains dismal, they may well conclude that the police service is no longer set up to serve the best interests of ordinary citizens.

That bodes ill for the co-operative model which has broadly served the UK well for so long. The best of police officers understand this instinctively, as did the “general instructions” from 1829, which saw much of this coming, in rule five, which says that the force should “seek and preserve public favour, not by pandering to public opinion; but by constantly demonstrating absolutely impartial service to law.”

Hatred, it seems, is the new currency of politics. So it might sound deliberately perverse to argue that love is at the heart of the problem. But there is a strong case to be made that the root cause of today’s toxic culture is love — and our two opposing understandings of it.

Back in 1930, the protestant Swedish theologian Anders Nygren wrote his highly influential Agape and Eros, proposing that these two terms represented contrasting and even contradictory expressions. Nygren suggested that Eros was an ego-centric and acquisitive kind of love, a love that puts the needs of the lover at the centre of the picture. Eros, he contended, is a spiritualised form of self-interest.

Agape, by contrast, is a love that shows no partiality. It is a love of humanity in general; irrespective of where people come from, what skin colour they have, how they make love, what religion they are. It is disinterested and impartial.

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So what’s wrong with this? A strong theological contrast to the view of Nygren can be found in the work of the Jewish theologian and philosopher Michael Wyschogrod — not someone at the forefront of the cultural zeitgeist perhaps, but bear with me. For Wyschogrod, all love, properly speaking, is the concrete love of one person for another. There is, he contends, no such thing as love in general. All love is partial and specific — it is Eros. (This, for instance, is why he thinks it is perfectly justifiable that the God of the Bible has a very special — indeed preferential — love for the Jewish people.)

Undifferentiated love, he writes, “does not meet the individual in his individuality, but sees him as a member of a species, whether that species be the working class, the poor, those created in the image of God, or whatnot… In the name of these abstractions men have committed the most heinous crimes against real, concrete, existing human beings.” Love, then, is intrinsically partial. For Agape lovers, love makes us all equal. For Eros lovers, it really doesn’t.

What does this mean in practice? Well, I have a very partial love of my children. I have their photo on my phone, rather than one of some random human. The love I have for them is highly specific. They are not avatars for some generalised love of humanity. They are absolutely not fungible, just as one dollar bill is exchangeable for any other.

So here is the opposition between Agape and Eros: Agape love believes that love proceeds from the general to the specific; Eros love believes that it proceeds from the specific to the general. Joy Division had it right: love will tear us apart.

Certainly both forms of love may struggle to reach out too far from their original expression: Agape loves the general category of human beings, but often finds it difficult to express its love of the singular, individual human life, worrying that too much investment in one specific person distorts its universal mission. It can be nervous of the passionate intensity generated by specific bonds.

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By contrast, Eros can all too easily become trapped in a domestic or nationalistic frame, failing to reach out beyond the narrowly specific. “Flag shaggers” is the derogatory phrase de jour; a recognition that love of country can have overly erotic, and thus overly partial, connotations. What us nationalists see as love, they see as hate.

But this charge of not being able to properly love is also what us Eros lovers think of Agape lovers: their love is not carnal enough, too abstract, lacking in passion. We are deeply divided by what we think of as love. It is Romanticism vs the Enlightenment endlessly replayed.

Consider, for example, the extreme Agapeism of someone like the philosopher Peter Singer and his argument about the moral claims that animals have over us:

“… the racist violates the principle of equality by giving greater weight to the interests of members of his own race. Similarly, the speciesist allows the interests of his own species to override the greater interests of members of other species. The pattern is the same in each case.”

Singer believes that our moral lives should be guided by a generosity to life in general. In his utilitarian calculus, the interests of all human life — and indeed non-human — life has to be weighed on the basis of an equal consideration of interests, broadly determined as the capacity to feel pain and appreciate happiness. And Singer is interesting because he seeks to live his life quite rigorously by these standards.

I once, rather facetiously, asked Singer how he could justify buying Christmas presents for his children, given that such gifts are obviously an expression of his partiality. His answer, in effect, was that we are all fallen creatures. For the extreme Agapeist, Eros love is a kind of secular sin, albeit an understandable one. We seemed to exist on entirely different moral planets.

But while many of us instinctively fall into one of these categories, I wonder whether this way of describing contrasting approaches to our moral and political lives isn’t just the cause of so much hatred, but also contains the basis for a kind of natural sympathy. After all, the Eros lover knows that they must reach out further than their partiality; hence the oft-mentioned dictum that charity begins at home but doesn’t end there.

Likewise, even extreme Agapeists like Singer appreciate the call to love in the singular, even if they don’t quite know how to square it with their wider philosophy. Few would now subscribe to the Marxist desire to abolish the family — not because they believe in allegedly right-wing family values, but because the family, in all its Eros partiality, is still the place where many of us learn what love means.

We are, after all, more invested in other expressions of love than those which define our core political commitments. Radicals who want to love the whole world can still say “forsaking all others” at their marriages, without a feeling of contradiction. Similarly, when I shout En-ger-land enthusiastically at the telly, I can be expressing partiality without the presumption of absolute superiority.

Many Remainers can and do love their country. Leavers can and do love people beyond it. The human heart is often the root of political division. But it might also be the place where we best understand each other too.

The ruling upheld Miller’s right to tweet critical remarks about the belief that transgender individuals are literally the sex they identify as. It was hailed by many as “a good day for free speech in Britain”, but while free speech campaigners are fond of painting today’s censorious “You can’t say that!” climate as a decline from some notional golden age of free speech, just how long — and how golden — has that age really been?

Suggested reading

The truth about free speech in Britain

By Peter Hitchens

We may never (yet) have had a Gestapo. But for most of England’s history there have been widely accepted restrictions on permitted speech, in the form of the common law offences of blasphemy and blasphemous libel. The last successful prosecution on these grounds took place 43 years ago, in 1977, when the editor of Gay News published a poem about a Roman centurion’s love for Jesus and was taken to court by moralist Mary Whitehouse.

Though Whitehouse won, the Gay News case contributed to the demise of blasphemy laws in England. The ruling was appealed and eventually made its way to the European Court of Human Rights in 1982, where it was declared inadmissible. The case, appeal and European ruling prompted a Law Commission review of English blasphemy laws that concluded in 1985 that “the common law offences of blasphemy and blasphemous libel should be abolished without replacement”.

The history of twentieth century England is seen — and often celebrated — as a period of society’s progressive liberation from the moral yoke of religion. The Law Commission’s recommendation was finally taken up in 2008, when blasphemy was abolished as a common law offence.

But the waning of public support for prohibitions on anti-Christian speech did not result in a free speech free-for-all. Far from it: the period between the 1985 Law Commission review and the 2008 abolition of blasphemy as a common law offence saw the arrival on the statute book of four new Acts governing a different, non-religious order of things “you can’t say”. These are the 1987 Public Order Act, the 1991 Football Offences Act, the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act and the 2003 Criminal Justice Act.

The Public Order Act covers incitement to racial hatred, while the Football Offences Act forbids racist chants during matches. The Crime and Disorder Act deals with racially and religiously aggravated harassment, assault, damage and stalking, and the Criminal Justice Act allows prosecutors to apply for an increased sentence for those convicted of various kinds of hate crime.

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By Graham Linehan

Hate crime is not blasphemy. But from a humanist perspective on the nature of religion, laws prohibiting hate speech serve a similar purpose to the now-abolished ones governing blasphemy; they just serve a different set of values.

In his 1841 humanist classic The Essence of Christianity, Ludwig Feuerbach proposed that religions are not divine in origin, but rather created by human cultures as a vehicle for the expression of everything higher to which that culture aspires. Thus, per Feuerbach, a society’s shared ideals shape what that society understands God to be. (The kaleidoscopic variety of world religions make a strong case that this is at least partly true whether or not God exists.) In turn, that understanding of God shapes the culture. Monotheistic religions, for example, conceive of “the other” very differently to polytheistic ones, which has numerous practical political consequences.

If we thus understand a religion to be (at least on one level) a way of talking about our highest ideals, then the purpose of blasphemy laws becomes clear. They serve as a kind of ideological immune system, designed to eliminate attacks on whatever values we hold most sacred.

This understanding of the social threat posed by blasphemy is articulated in England’s first recorded trial for blasphemy — Taylor’s Case in 1676. The Taylor in question was found guilty of uttering “divers blasphemous expressions, horrible to hear”. In his judgement, Sir Matthew Hale gave his view that blasphemy constitutes an attack on the cohesion of civil society:

wicked blasphemous words [are] not only an offence to God and religion, but a crime against the laws, State and Government […] For to say, religion is a cheat, is to dissolve all those obligations whereby the civil societies are preserved, and that Christianity is parcel of the laws of England ; and therefore to reproach the Christian religion is to speak in subversion of the law.

If prohibitions on blasphemy serve to protect a culture’s sacred values, then the replacement of blasphemy laws with hate crime legislation between 1985 and 2008 is not evidence of a sinister plot to roll back gains made by advocates of free speech. Rather, it shows the moment when one set of sacred values was definitively replaced by another. What, then, do we hold sacred now?

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The replacement of blasphemy with hate crime reflects, in effect, the triumph of a Hobbesian view of humans as fundamentally atomised. Published 25 years before Sir Matthew Hale adjudicated on Taylor’s Case, in 1651, Hobbes’ Leviathan argued that the “state of natur”’ for humans has no naturally shared higher purpose or common good. It is rather, Hobbes argued, a state in which self-interested individuals fight (in a “war of all against all”) over who can, through force of will or acts of violence, succeed in realising their desires.

In this view of human nature, individual autonomy is our foundational state, and the task of government is to protect this autonomy as far as possible while preventing it taking forms inimical to others’ autonomy. As elaborated by numerous political philosophers since Hobbes, this radical conception of autonomy — the subject of countless “self-care” articles on the internet — is the only sacred value given concrete protection in law today.

On the same day as the Harry Miller ruling, a second ruling also took place, on another case that also turned on the socially accepted limits to free speech concerning the transgender debate. In this ruling, Kate Scottow received a criminal record for tweets in which she refused to use transgender woman Stephanie Hayden’s preferred pronouns, and referred to Hayden as “a pig in a wig”.

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By Antonia Senior

Are our sacred values for or against free speech, then? Public debate since the rulings has been bitter. But if we read the Miller and Scottow judgements as a process of working out the political implications of enshrining radical individualism in law as worthy of protection against blasphemy, they emerge not as contradictory so much as addressing different implications of this view of our nature.

On the one hand, if there is no common good, then of course we must be as far as possible free to say what we like. Thus Harry Miller remains free to debate transgender ideology without police appearing at his workplace. In this way, the sacred value of individual freedom is upheld.

But if we are committed to radical individualism, another logical consequence is that identity is never legitimately conferred by a group. Indeed, the common characteristic of hate crime, the core of the moral violation it forbids, is the reduction of an individual to perceived group characteristics. A group identity imposed rather than freely chosen is a gross insult to individual self-definition.

If we accept this, it follows that an individual’s right to ignore even observable reality in favour of self-defined “gender identity” will come to be seen as their sovereign right — a right worthy of protection under the sacred value of individual autonomy. It also follows that disagreeing with that self-identification will be framed as an attack on that sacred value, and sanctioned via blasphemy laws.

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As we can see in the conflicting rulings on the Scottow and Miller cases, this sacred value of individualism is increasingly in conflict with itself. Our protected freedom to say what we want is locked in an ever more bitter struggle with the equally protected right of individuals to define their own identity. To put it another way, the right to express ourselves freely is increasingly in conflict with the right to free self-expression. It is a mess. No wonder the debate around transgender identity — that quintessential privileging of individual desire over given characteristics — is being incoherently policed.

In replacing a conception of the common good with radical individualism, we have elevated as a sacred value what amounts to a self-undermining doctrine of radical solipsism, that both promotes absolute free speech and provides an unshakeable argument for its negation. This Catch-22 seems designed to drive us (and our law enforcement) collectively mad. It is fashionable to upbraid the police for their handling of gender identity related hate crime, but they merit more sympathy than criticism, as they are truly in an impossible situation.

Abolishing all restrictions on free speech will not solve this, unless we also abolish all sacred values — even our current sacred value of individual autonomy. And in that case we are effectively arguing for the abolition of all forms of social cohesion — even radically individualistic ones. This seems neither sensible nor realistic. Rather than putting up a futile resistance to blasphemy laws, a pragmatic alternative might be to consider whether in fact what we need is better sacred values.

The strange thing is that the piece was a defence of Muslim women’s right to wear the full veil, and a condemnation of the Danish government’s decision to ban them. It was a couple of nasty little throwaway lines that caused the outrage, rather than the content itself.

Now, the NGO Tell MAMA, which records anti-Muslim incidents, has said that the piece was followed by a 375% surge in abuse and attacks on Muslims. The Guardian goes further, saying that the comments “led to a surge in anti-Muslim attacks”.

That sounded absolutely extraordinary to me. A 375% increase is enormous. So I thought I’d have a closer look.

The report records all “anti-Muslim incidents” received by Tell MAMA. That includes offline and online incidents, and also both verbal abuse and physical assaults. Tell MAMA says that it received 1,282 reports of anti-Muslim incidents in 2018, and that it “verified” 1,072 of them, 745 of which were offline.

Johnson’s “letterboxes” column was published on Monday 5 August 2018. In the week before that, Tell MAMA “received 8 reports of street-based (offline) anti-Muslim attacks”, by which I think they mean all incidents. But in the week afterward, the 6th to the 13th, “this jumped to 38, an increase of 375%”.

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If I’ve read it correctly, and they’re referring to all verified offline incidents, then 745 incidents a year translates to a bit more than 14 a week, on average. So the eight reported the week before was anomalously low, making that 375% increase sound much more dramatic.

Still, 38 is 165% above the average. But, again, I can’t work out whether that’s unusual. The report doesn’t give weekly breakdowns, so I can’t see whether the numbers are usually pretty steady around the average, or if they jump up and down a lot. If the former, then a week of 38 is surprising; if the latter, it might not be. (I have asked Tell MAMA for more information, but so far, I haven’t heard anything; I’ll add an update here if I hear back from them.)

They do have a breakdown by month, which shows in August there were around 70 of these incidents, about the same as April, May and June, and rather lower than March, which had a little over 80. The Tell MAMA report says that the March spike was driven by a horrible letter-writing campaign called Punish a Muslim Day which called for anti-Muslim attacks on the 3 April.

I think, though, that the really standout thing about these numbers is how tiny they are. For instance, there were only 327 verified anti-Muslim incidents online in the whole of 2018. I can’t believe for a second that there aren’t more than that every day on Twitter alone, if “anti-Muslim incident” includes abusive language.

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There are more than three million Muslims in the UK. Tell MAMA recorded about 1,000 anti-Muslim incidents, on and offline, and said that the police recorded nearly 2,000 more (they say there’s no overlap). If those numbers are the whole story – and Tell MAMA are very clear in saying that they’re not – then at most one in 1,000 British Muslims were the victims of anti-Muslim abuse of some form last year. I would be amazed if that’s not a huge underestimate.

What that means is that it’s much less likely that the Tell MAMA numbers are recording real underlying change. It’s like an opinion poll – the smaller your sample, the less likely it is to be representative of the population. In real opinion polls, the pollsters try to get around that problem by finding a representative sample, and weighting it where it is not.

The Tell MAMA numbers come from people who contact Tell MAMA, which is a non-random, non-representative sample of the population. It could, for instance, be simply that, in the aftermath of high-profile events such as Johnson’s column, anti-racist projects such as Tell MAMA get more publicity and so get more reports. Given the difficulty of teasing out media effects on real-world behaviour, that sounds more likely to me than a single column, behind the Telegraph paywall, causing a 375% spike in incidents.

The question, of course, is what is really happening with anti-Muslim hate crimes and abuse. Unnervingly, hate crimes recorded by the police have gone up dramatically in the past few years: from a little over 40,000 in 2011/12 to nearly 100,000 in 2017/18. Racially motivated crimes have gone up from 35,000 to 70,000; religiously motivated ones from 1,600 to 8,300.

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But those increases, according to the police themselves, are largely due to the police getting better at recording these sorts of crimes, and a growing public awareness of them leading to more reporting. A Home Office hate crime report, using the Crime Survey for England and Wales data, reports that the total number of hate crimes has in fact dropped, from around 300,000 in 2007 to about 184,000 in 2018, although religiously motivated incidents have stayed roughly steady at about 38,000.

Interestingly, there was some evidence (not from the CSEW but from Home Office figures) of some spikes after major incidents – but those incidents were huge national news stories, such as the EU referendum or the five terror attacks in 2017, not pay-walled columns. And even they aren’t anything like the 375% increase Tell MAMA claims; they’re larger spikes in a spiky line.

So the problem is both less and more than the Tell MAMA report suggests, I think. Boris Johnson’s reckless column gets far more notoriety than it deserves; it may have caused a few isolated incidents, but I would be astonished if it had the sort of major effect it claims. But hate crimes in general are much more common than the small numbers Tell MAMA records.

Tell MAMA aren’t a polling company: they exist to give Muslims a place to report the abuse and attacks they find themselves on the end of. I don’t blame them for trying to collate that data and turn it into something useful. But the media should know better than to take the dramatic numbers it comes up with at face value, assume a causal link where none can be shown, and then plaster the whole thing under a dramatic headline. Britain already feels like a powder keg, and these are just more sparks flying around.

His assertion to Andrew Marr incurred much derision on social media, and since I loathe Mr Burgon’s politics, I was happy to giggle away. My favourite retort came from Patrick Wintour, the Guardian journalist:

“The age of the experts is over” declares Labour MP Richard Burgon. In Burgon’s case it never started, an expert replies. Sad that any front rank politician celebrates ignorance.

— Patrick Wintour (@patrickwintour) November 25, 2018

But I come not to bury the hapless Mr Burgon, and if I can’t bring myself to praise Burgon either, at least let me admit “I know what he was on about”.  To prove my point, let’s start again.

As an expert in human genetics and functional genomics (how changes to the genome can affect the human phenotype, the observable traits of the human animal), and on the day we read claims that a Chinese researcher has successfully engineered twin girls with a disposition to be resistant to HIV, my views on gene editing are naturally of interest.

If this be true, and reproducible, we stand on the dawn of a new age of genetically-engineered health. Ethical objections to these techniques are born from ignorance, often religiously-derived ignorance, and should be tossed aside. Increased government funding should be directed towards this research as a matter of urgency.

Further reading

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By Graeme Archer

See what I did there? All the authority for my instructions on how you should think, and act politically (overcome ethical concerns, spend more of other people’s money), is derived from the paragraph’s innocent-seeming – encouraging, even – opening five words. “As an expert in functional genomics”. My views on ethics and public spending, however, are no more nor no less important than your own.  (And, for the record, I’m no expert in genetics but I do work with some clever people who are.)

Be wary, then, of any sentence which begins with “As a…”, and its intrinsic claim to authority derived from personal expertise. As a gay man, I object to homophobia and support the increased penalties for such behaviour enshrined in hate crime legislation. What does the opening subordinate clause add to the weight of the follow-on principal clause’s assertion? Nothing. It’s just an attempt to tell you – if you’re not an expert on life as a gay man – to “stay in your lane”, shut up, and nod along with my views.

Were you to disagree, now, with the whole apparatus of hate crime, you’d not only be arguing against the principle (that penalties for otherwise identical crimes should be differentiated with regard to an arbitrary aspect of the victim’s make-up), you’d be arguing against me, my very being, my grievance-mongering identity. What are you: some sort of a beast? From expertise to political shut-down: all with one glibly attractive phrase.

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By Graeme Archer

On this issue, then, I’m closer to Richard Burgon (and certainly, to Michael Gove) than to any Tory MP who feels the need to advertise his training as a GP on his Twitter handle.

“As a doctor and an MP, I believe we need [yadda yadda yadda]”, wrote Philip Lee, the Conservative MP for Bracknell. What Phil believes you need isn’t important (he wants you to vote again, until you agree with him about the EU, basically); what’s shocking is his (I’m sure) unthinking and reflexive call for you to obey him because he’s an “expert” (he was a GP before entering Parliament.)

Medics who become politicians are particularly prone to this “expertosis”, which I define as the pathological endpoint of the political corruption of “expertise”. It occurs when an expert conflates his or her technical knowledge about a topic with downstream political actions. There was an epidemic of expertosis, of course, during the EU referendum.

Indeed, that outbreak continues to crackle – Philip is hardly unique – with some Remain experts so certain in their assertions that predictions subject to uncertainty (about GDP, about the NHS, should Brexit take one form or another) are presented as observable facts which only irrational fools would query. The talented musician Howard Goodall is an expert on music. This allows him to assert that Brexit will “sacrifice” the “booming British music industry” on “the altar of Brexit xenophobia”.

Not one mention of music in May's WA or PD, & only a few sentences of vague uncertain waffle about mobility of talent. Our jobs-creating, revenue-earning, forward-facing, booming music industry sacrificed on the altar of Brexit xenophobia. Put it to the people.

— Howard Goodall (@Howard_Goodall) November 25, 2018

Read the responses to his claim – the slavishly devoted nature of those who want him to be correct is alarming.

This matters, beyond the psychology of those who think music, air and water will stop, should we no longer be part of the EU. There are plenty of surveys showing that the younger generation in particular has less of an attachment to democracy than one would have hoped.

It’s at least a theory that the exposure of young people to overly confident “experts” might explain their fondness for a whole set of controversial political opinions.

“If he says it, it must be true, because he’s an expert” is dangerous: just a slip from revoking the universal franchise. We’re skidding about that edge now: Dambisa Moyo argues here that voters should pass an (expert-derived) test, before being allowed to vote. Would you bet against the popularity of that proposal in Remain-voting areas?

Expertise within its locus is a human triumph: the uses to which I put my PhD in statistical inference, the work with equally skilled colleagues in many scientific disciplines (including the geneticists and genomics experts) – all this gives me more pleasure than all the joy in Mendelssohn’s violin concerto. And were you to enquire about the logic of the scientific method, I’d deploy my expertise to influence you as much as I’m able.

But political deference to “experts”, when their opinions stray from their technical discipline, leads ineluctably to restrictions on political freedom. You can trust me on that – after all, as I may have mentioned: I’m a doctor.

In addition to reporting hate crime, please report non-crime hate incidents, which can include things like offensive or insulting comments, online, in person or in writing. Hate will not be tolerated in South Yorkshire. Report it and put a stop to it #HateHurtsSY pic.twitter.com/p2xf6OLoQZ

— South Yorkshire Police (@syptweet) September 9, 2018

This tweet from the South Yorkshire constabulary – to which we’ll return – reminded me of something I wrote for a scientific journal in 1996:

“Most of us are critical realists, in that we believe the Universe exists and that we can learn something about its mechanisms by measuring observable phenomena.”

At the time that felt uncontroversial; now it makes me laugh aloud. Not because I no longer believe in the Universe, or the importance of using language as precisely as possible to describe it, in order to produce valid conclusions about the laws that govern (biological, psychological, cultural) existence. I laugh because I no longer believe that “most of us” think any such thing.

“Most of us” – most of those with power, anyway, about whom I’m most concerned – “most of us” seem to believe that the Universe exists only as an extension of our own desires, and that its reality is nothing more than anything we care to assert at any given moment in time.

To such pathologically subjective people – path-subs, let’s call them – simply to declare “This is a fact” is sufficient to turn “this” into a fact; no more evidence about the nature of “this” is required, and any evidence that is produced, which appears to contradict the claim, can – and must – be dismissed out of hand.

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Once you accept that powerful people and institutions have adopted this path-sub worldview, then a lot of what at first seems crazy about modern life begins to make sense.

Don’t believe the world is round? Just say “The world is flat”, and pancake-like it becomes. Look what happened to Angelos Sofocleous when he tweeted “Women don’t have penises”: hounded from the philosophy magazine he edited. (Let’s take a second to note the delicious, beautiful irony of Mr Sofocleous’s name.)

You can dismiss the suffering of Sofocleous as mere student idiocy. Until you remember the British state’s 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 disability or perceived disability; race or perceived race; or religion or perceived religion; or sexual orientation or perceived sexual orientation or transgender identity or perceived transgender identity.”

The Crown Prosecution Service, from whose site I’ve copied that definition, goes on to say:

“There is no legal definition of hostility so we use the everyday understanding of the word which includes ill-will, spite, contempt, prejudice, unfriendliness, antagonism, resentment and dislike.”

I’ve bolded the overt insertions of path-sub thinking in those definitions. For a hate crime to be committed, it’s sufficient for me to assert that it has. End of debate. I don’t even require to have witnessed the incident to which I’ve decided to apply the label. And that criminal offence itself might have been motivated by “unfriendliness”. Remember that, the next time you stand on my foot on the tube, and don’t return my friendly greeting.

To be clear: I’m temperamentally opposed to the concept of hate crime, since to my boring old Tory mind it is the crime that matters, not its motivation. Ian Baynham died from the kicking he received from a pack of homophobic scum; Alan Greaves was battered to death by non-homophobic scum. The deaths of Ian and Alan don’t weigh differently, to my mind. I couldn’t care less about the motives of their attackers.

However, I can accept that society might take a different view. I can see why its politics might say, “The motivation for some crimes is so abhorrent that we label them as hateful and judge their protagonists especially harshly.” You and I can disagree about this; nothing bad would follow.

But the path-sub perversion of the hate crime definition does matter, because it distorts reality. It leaves the critical realist – the man or woman who requires evidence to back-up assertions about the state of things – at the mercy of the path-sub activist, who can change reality (“That was a hate crime”) at the tap of a keyboard. And once we grant permission to the path-subs to create the reality in which we all have to live, we are at their mercy.

Further reading

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By Graeme Archer

Especially in South Yorkshire? Before pushing the path-sub envelope with that interesting take on hate crime, exemplified by our opening quote, South Yorkshire constabulary turned a blind eye to the sexual abuse of hundreds of South Yorkshire girls, over a period of years. Professor Alexis Jay, who investigated this atrocity, concluded that police “gave no priority to child sexual abuse, regarded many victims with contempt and failed to act on their reports of abuse”.

This, um, flexible approach to applying path-sub rules about hate crime strikes people as bizarre. South Yorkshire police want to know if you’ve done anything mildly unpleasant; that same force declined to investigate the objectively hateful. Similarly, you can be arrested for saying “Excuse me, do you realise that your horse is gay?”, but the Metropolitan police won’t lift a finger while you subject a Conservative MP’s children to what anyone reasonable would call vicious psychological abuse. Even if they’re standing next to you while you do it.

Isn’t that a contradiction? Surely, think Tories and liberals across the centre-Right spectrum, surely this obvious contradiction will cause the whole path-sub house of cards to collapse?

Dream on, matey. The contradiction isn’t a problem; it’s an inherent and deliberate attribute of the path-sub architecture. While old-fashioned types like myself worry about the incoherent stances adopted by various institutions in hock to path-sub thinking, the path-sub activist rejoices at our confusion. Path-sub politicians and activists couldn’t be happier that I’ve spent a few hours trying to unravel their contradictory ideas: that’s two hours a Conservative didn’t spend rallying the electoral base to fight back. That’s two hours when they were out there, bending reality to their will.

From universities, to our criminal justice systems, to our politics. Path-sub is the mindset of the Corbynite – you can see their spiteful toddler “deductions” all over social media: “Because all Tories are evil, there is no level of abuse to which they cannot be subjected.”

This week, Rupa Huq, a Labour MP from west London tweeted an image of the gates at Downing Street:

They rejected calls to create nationwide ones outside abortion clinics but Tories *do* support buffer zones to protect *some* women… Thatcher had these gates erected in 1980s now Theresa “my way or the highway” May lives in splendid isolation behind them pic.twitter.com/a8mTXXrNo4

— Rupa Huq MP (@RupaHuq) September 18, 2018

The gates, of course, were put in place to protect our democracy from terrorist attacks. Let’s not forget Rupa Huq’s party leader’s interesting history with regard to the progenitors of some of those terrorist campaigns, for example being arrested at a demo organised to show sympathy for the Brighton bombers.

Huq knows this. She knows that you know that she knows this. But neither the grotesquely offensive nature of her tweet, nor the overt rewriting of history by a former sociology lecturer matters a damn. Huq says: (Female) Tories have gates to protect their splendid isolation, and that becomes the truth.

Everything real is contingent to the path-sub’s political desire. If reality is contingent then the truth is subjective, or, more accurately, the “truths” are subjective, from which it follows they can be put into a rank order.

Truth A – that Thatcher had security gates installed because terrorists were trying to kill her – can be held in the hands of path-sub MPs, and measured against Truth B – that Thatcher was a Tory, Tories hate and fear the people, so Thatcher installed gates to keep the virtuous mob from the door. Guess which “truth” the Corbynite university lecturers are whispering in the ears of your children.

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If you don't 'get' statistics it's just as bad as not 'getting' Shakespeare

By Graeme Archer

Back in 1996, I wrote that we can’t understand the universe, in any useful way, without accepting that it exists beyond our consciousness. Throughout my adult life I’ve believed that words matter, as they are our thoughts made (metaphorical) flesh, and so are also real objects in that same universe they are attempting to describe. Words are real things, with power.

Increasingly, and terrifyingly, only the last sentence of that paragraph holds water. Words have power, all right, but their actual meaning (define “hate crime”) no longer matters. Facts don’t matter. Biology doesn’t matter. History doesn’t matter. The truth is whatever the pathologically subjective declares it to be.

Such wordcrime is strong enough to destroy institutions (see our police service and universities for details). Liberals and Conservatives must stop ignoring this. What would happen, for example, were a pathologically subjective Corbyn-led government to assert that “There’s no such thing as a good Conservative”? What reality do you imagine would follow from that?

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