Don’t you just hate that?

Hate crime is the new... er what, exactly? The Association of Chief Police Officers and the CPS have agreed a common definition: "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 race or perceived race; religion or perceived religion; sexual orientation or perceived sexual orientation; disability or perceived disability and any crime motivated by hostility or prejudice against a person who is transgender or perceived to be transgender." This helps not one bit; do they really have not one single advisor who has grown up in normal society?

Under this ruling most of the country’s children would have criminal records before they started school, were it not for the age of criminal responsibility... which is ten. So, make that before they start high school. No wonder there is a reported increase in hate crime ‘since the referendum’, as if the vote to leave the EU has suddenly caused all we bigoted little Englanders to release our hate on the world. If we’re going along with this nonsense how about the collective, focused and very real – forget your ‘perceived’ malarkey – sustained attack on leavers by the establishment.

Day after day we have to read in the press, online and in social media, about how our views are not wanted here, about how ‘people like you’ have condemned the whole nation to privation and diminished aspirations. We are told we are less intelligent, more thuggish and how we either live on welfare or work in menial jobs. Honestly, they say, it is clear that such dregs must not be allowed to subvert democracy by being allowed to vote. Try saying any of that about somebody identifiable as ethnically not from these isles and stand by for the dawn raid and the baton beatings.

Voltaire is popularly supposed to have said that if you want to know who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticise. Whether this originates from the aphorism-generating French polymath or not it has a tempting trueness to it. But by this measure the usual notion of European ruling elites is somewhat inaccurate because it would seem that the one group we actually can criticise is straight, white Christian men. Hate crime legislation has pretty ruled out criticising anybody else, so maybe the real boss is a cross-dressing, gender fluid, disabled gay vegetarian with a lisp.

For a working definition of hate crime see 1984’s thought crime. If you think that is somewhat far-fetched remember that ‘islamophobia’ has already seen people charged. Think about that for a moment; being afraid of that surly looking, bearded man with the scowl and a rucksack full of explosives can make you the bad guy. If the apologists for every aberration, every deviation from ‘the norm’ could actually police our very thoughts they certainly would; Minority Report is only nominally a fiction. Don’t you just hate that?