The solution to thought policing in the UK isn’t to raise the threshold of what constitutes an Orwellian ‘non-crime hate incident’ (NCHI), writes Lionel Shriver for the Spectator. What we need to do is “abolish eye-of-the-beholder ‘hate speech’ laws altogether. She continues:
Right after Donald Trump’s landslide, I opined on YouTube that this turning point could sound the death knell for Woke World – an observation that decayed to hoary cliché within hours. I also supposed that Trump’s triumph might signal to the UK that all that diversity, equality and inclusion/systemic racism guff is totally yesterday – in the hopes that even if Brits don’t care about fairness, rationality and reason, they might at least be horrified by appearing passé.
I regret not getting that cheerful forecast in print, because I rarely write optimistic columns, and the window for celebrating this crippling blow to poisonous progressive politics has already closed. Last week’s persecution of the beguiling Daily Telegraph journalist Allison Pearson by Essex Police is a reminder that we can’t defeat a lethal social brain cancer just by staying up late on a Tuesday night. Identitarians have engaged in their long march through the institutions, and for the long march in reverse we’ll have to lace up our boots. Obsession with race, ethnicity and ‘gender’ now permeates even law enforcement, and removing wokery’s pernicious influence from civic life will be as tedious as picking crab.
On Remembrance Sunday, two Essex Police officers knocked on her door to inform her that a ‘victim’ of a year-old tweet had reported her for inciting racial hatred – though they wouldn’t say which tweet or who had complained. The force has since made a huffy to-do in the papers over assumptions that this visit regarded a ‘non-crime hate incident’ (NCHI); they claim to be investigating a criminal crime.
Those of you who imagine that all crimes are criminal crimes would be sorely mistaken. The likes of NCHIs explain why the adjectives ‘Orwellian’ and ‘Kafkaesque’ have grown so shopworn – though as a novelist I’m heartened that literary icons are still semantic touchstones during an era when no one reads. (How many folks who fling those descriptors about have ever read Nineteen Eighty-Four or The Trial?) For police to pursue citizens for ‘non-crimes’ is a little like bin men coming round to your house to pick up ‘non-rubbish’ – thus hauling away your new sitting-room sofa.
As for Allison’s criminal crime, details have emerged. During the hot-headed days following 7 October, she retweeted what she thought was a photo of a group of pro-Palestinian Muslim protestors and three Met Police officers, remarking: ‘How dare they. Invited to pose for a photo with lovely peaceful British Friends of Israel on Saturday police refused. Look at this lot smiling with the Jew haters.’ Alerted to the fact that she had mistaken Manchester Police for the Met and supporters of Imran Khan’s Pakistani political party for pro-Palestinian protestors, she immediately deleted the tweet.
Was Allison in error? Sure. That’s one of the problems with X/Twitter: the format encourages impulsivity, while if publishing in the Telegraph she’d have looked before leaping. But while obviously all Muslims aren’t ‘Jew haters’, her underlying objection to two-tier policing and overt but unprosecuted anti-Semitism during pro-Hamas protests in London has been echoed by other journalists.
The complainant – an upstanding member of the public, aka a sanctimonious busybody – told the Guardian that the tweet was ‘racist and inflammatory’. A non-Muslim who’s clearly a type I call ‘Looking for a problem’, the digital curtain-twitcher further asserted: ‘Each time an influential person makes negative comments about people of colour I, as a person of colour, see an uptick in racist abuse towards me and the days after that tweet are [sic] no different.’ To perceive a discernible increase in ‘racist abuse’ directed at oneself personally due to a single careless X post among 500 million daily would require Princess and the Pea sensitivity. The complainant, who needs to learn that correlation is not causation, is a nut.
The solution here isn’t to raise the threshold of what constitutes a ‘non-crime hate incident’, a concept that would be right at home in (another literary touchstone) Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The very existence of such a category leaves the UK open to international ridicule.
The solution is to abolish eye-of-the-beholder ‘hate speech’ laws altogether.
As David Starkey has astutely observed, progressives like Tony Blair have inverted the prime directive of western democracies from instituting the will of the majority to protecting the rights of minorities, the rights of majorities be damned. We are rewarding touchiness and polarisation. We’re punishing a fine journalist, now justifiably anxious over whether bashing out one unthinking tweet will land her in jail. Our opinions and hasty online mistakes are none of the police’s business. Kamala Harris wants to ‘turn the page’? Well, so do I.
Worth reading in full.
