I WANT to congratulate the Chief Constable of Essex Police for doing a magnificent job.
Incredibly, every burglar, rapist, bike and bag thief, violent criminal and shoplifter in his county has been arrested and is on the way to court, and hopefully a prison term, while the good folk of Essex can sleep soundly in their beds knowing the streets are safe.
Surely this must be the case because otherwise, Chief Constable Ben-Julian Harrington wouldn’t have two officers with so little to do that they were sent to knock on the door of a middle-aged woman last Sunday, to question her about some apparently hurty words she wrote on social media a whole year ago.
Unfortunately, this turns out not to be the case.
Because in the last year, Essex police have solved just one in eight robberies and violent assaults, a mere one out of every ten sexual assaults and only one in 15 burglaries.
So you would think they’d have better things to do than harass an award- winning journalist in her dressing gown on a Sunday morning, wouldn’t you?
But you’d be wrong, because that is apparently what happened to Telegraph newspaper columnist Allison Pearson when police turned up at her door last weekend to question her, she claimed, about a “non-crime hate incident” (NCHI) she is alleged to have committed by posting a tweet on Twitter/X an entire year ago.
You might wonder why police would spend even a nano-second worrying about non-crimes when there are more than enough actual crimes for them to be dealing with.
But, according to Chief Constable Ben-Julian Harrington, “hate crime” ranks alongside rape, child abuse and stabbings as posing “the greatest potential threat” to our communities.
And, no, he doesn’t mean the terrorist bomb exploding as a kind of hate crime, he means hurty words that someone might be offended by.
Astonishingly, those hurty words don’t even have to be hateful, as an NCHI only requires that someone perceived them to be offensive, an entirely subjective opinion that requires no evidence and allows the accused no defence.
What’s even more worrying is that the Essex police chief is no worse than the 42 other chief constables who inflict this sinister madness on law-abiding citizens while abjectly failing to do the job of fighting real-life crime.
This is just the latest Orwellian assault on our right to free speech and no one should under-estimate the threat this poses to every other freedom we enjoy.
The creation of Thought Crime brings an imagined dystopian future into the here and now.
The Thought Police aren’t only taking on journalists, they’ve gone for supposedly wrong-thinking politicians too.
Amber Rudd, the former Tory Home Secretary, was accused of a non-crime for a party conference speech in 2016, while ex-cop Harry Miller had to go all the way to the High Court to get a ruling over a police report about a satirical tweet and women’s rights campaigner Maya Forstater still faces potential criminal charges for “malicious communication” for an allegedly transphobic tweet.
Even a 73-year-old woman was slapped with an NCHI simply for taking a photo of a sticker on a lamppost that stated “Keep males out of women-only spaces”!
You might think this would never happen to you.
Well, think again, because it’s already happened to an estimated 250,000 people since 2014, according to the Free Speech Union.
According to Chief Constable Ben-Julian Harrington, 'hate crime' ranks alongside rape, child abuse and stabbings as posing 'the greatest potential threat' to our communities
That’s an average of 66 people EVERY SINGLE DAY!
Many don’t even know they’ve got an NCHI recorded against them — until it’s flagged up by criminal records checks when they apply for a new job.
Even more extraordinarily, the police aren’t required to tell you what you’ve been accused of or who has accused you of a hate crime, making it impossible to defend yourself.
The Stasi would be proud.
The police officers who visited Allison allegedly refused to tell her which of her many tweets is under suspicion or what was hateful about it, or who has complained, and now say she may have committed an actual crime.
We are left with a victimless crime while Allison is a crimeless victim.
Big Brother, eat your heart out.
Elon Musk and Boris Johnson have weighed in on Allison’s case.
Welcome to Thought Crime Britain, where thieves and burglars are free to roam our streets with impunity, but saying the wrong thing — even when no crime has been committed — will bring the police knocking on your door
Julia
But these non-crimes were invented under a Tory government and things are only going to get worse with the Labour Home Secretary Yvette Cooper pushing police to record even more thought crimes against people who wrong-think and wrong-speak.
We don’t just have two-tier justice, we now have two-tier speech as well.
Welcome to Thought Crime Britain, where thieves and burglars are free to roam our streets with impunity, but saying the wrong thing — even when no crime has been committed — will bring the police knocking on your door.
THE Government plans to legalise electric scooters on our public roads.
Which is strange, because we already have more than a million of the damn things racing about our towns and cities, according to estimates.
Some weave dangerously in and out of traffic, riding terrifying fast along the pavement and then are unhelpfully dumped on the sidewalk.
Yet only rental scooters are currently legal on public roads as part of a bizarrely FOUR-YEAR trial.
Now we’re told it’s time to give in and accept these death traps are here to stay.
The one upside to legalising e-scooters is that we can then regulate them.
And that can only work if they have to be registered and have licence plates and insurance, so that the many rogue e-scooter riders who ignore red lights and ride on the pavement will face hefty fines to deter them.
I won’t hold my breath but can the blight of e-scooters really get any worse than it is already?
