Baseless hatred is a bad thing, I think that all reasonable people would agree with that statement. However it is impossible to legislate away an emotion like hate just as it is impossible to use the law to force one person to love another.
The commentator, scientist and musician Damian Counsell who runs a blog called Pootergeek has come up with one of the best lines I’ve seen regarding the increasingly and justifiably hated ‘hate crime’ laws.
“Hate crime” laws do nothing to reduce the sum of human hatred, but they always reduce the sum of human freedom.
He was speaking in the context of the appalling situation where ‘hate crime’ laws are being used by the Police Service of Northern Ireland against a lesbian feminist to harass her for speaking out against the Cult of Trans and those who make excuses for paedophiles. Mr Counsell is 100% correct with regards to the impact of ‘hate crime’ laws in the UK. They have done nothing to stop people hating one another but they have reduced the freedom of Britons immensely and have helped to prevent Britons from speaking about issues that often desperately need to be aired.
Hate laws only result in smoldering resentment and don’t actually prevent any crime. They do however bring 1984 nearer every day which is probably the object of the exercise.
Hate speech laws don’t reduce hate they just push the expression of it into dark corners either in real life or online. They are an enemy of free debate and indeed freedom itself as we can see from the use of ‘hate speech’ laws and similar legislation by trans activists to suppress debate. I’m with Churchill in that I’d rather see jaw jaw than war war and we need debate,even if these debates are difficult or contain stuff that people find offensive in order to get through problems. There was an interesting Muslim commentator recently who said that non Muslims should not be excluded from debates about Islam, which is something that I agree with.
Not forgetting that the Plods are very fond of concocting “complaints” by “interpreting” these deliberately and very widely and badly drafted laws to go after soft targets who won’t riot or call them waaaycist, but are used to crush free expression and hammer any dissent.
You’ve spoken to me about this and know how much I despise and mistrust the bastards. In Scotland this would be considered a “hate crime” under Ayatollah Humza McYousaf’s new law and the truly disgusting and wholly misleadingly named “Online Harms Bill” will codify oppressive censorship and encourage the Plods even further, to go after “dissenters”.
If this is supposed to be a posthumous “legacy” to the tragically murdered David Ames’s, then I cannot think of a worse legacy in his name.
I’m a lifelong REAL Conservative, but this shower’o’shite have drifted so far they may as well be sitting with Starmer’s Communists as you can barely get a cigarette paper between them when it comes to stealing our freedoms and trashing our rights and ownership rights.
It’s reached a stage where unless there’s a credible conservative Independent, I will be staying at home for future elections. There’s no point voting for a Hobson’s Choice anymore.
Like you I wonder where the complaint initially came from. I also agree that the ‘Harms’ bill could end up as a censors charter. I’m also highly disappointed at how the Tories have turned out, I feel like that Orwell quote from the end of Animal Farm when looking at the Tories and Labour. The problem with staying at home and not voting is that you get something worse than what you might have got had you voted. After all it was the Apathy Party that helped Sadiq Khan over the line in the last London mayoral elections.