by
Les May
ELLA
Whelan,
author of the book ‘What
Women Want: Fun, Freedom and an End to Feminism’,
has described the campaign by MP Stella Creasy to have misogyny
classified as a hate crime as, ‘a
top-down act of virtue-signalling by a handful of MPs and feminists,
and an affront to freedom’.
It’s
top down because as she points out women
are not marching in the streets for the criminalisation of misogyny.
It’s an affront to
freedom because it seeks to punish individuals
for what they think, not what they do, i.e. thought crime.
Now
whilst I share Ella Whelan’s view on this there is I think a more
practical objection. If you think
you’ve witnessed a hate crime, who you gonna call? Certainly not
‘The Ghost Busters’! It’s the police of course.
The
problem is that the police may not understand what constitutes a hate
crime and what constitutes free speech.
A
week ago it was reported that in
Bath city centre a Christian street preacher by the name of Dale
McAlpine was threatened with arrest
and forced to leave the
area. Police issued a dispersal notice to a group of preachers and
ordered them to leave the city centre. It seems that one of the
officers involved claimed they were committing a ‘hate
crime’.
The
outcome? Avon
and Somerset police have contacted all police staff in Bath ‘to
ensure they understand the importance of freedom of expression’.
It
isn’t the first time that McAlpine has been in trouble for
expressing unpopular views. In 2010 was arrested after he told a
Police Community
Support
Officer
(PCSO)
that
as a Christian he believed
homosexuality was a sin. As
the term ‘hate
crime’
was not fashionable then, the PCSO contented himself with having
McAlpine arrested for making ‘homophobic
remarks’.
The
outcome? The
charges were dropped and
police
in Cumbria agreed to pay him £7,000 in compensation as well as his
legal costs. McAlpine
responded ‘I
hope the police will in future do their duty defending freedom of
speech.’
I
may
not have any sympathy with McAlpine’s beliefs, but I’m glad that
he’s there. It’s people
like
him
that
remind us that freedom
of expression applies to people you disagree with as well as those
whose views coincide with yours. The
alternative is the echo chamber of social media where you need only
listen to views that coincide with your own.
My
motivation in writing this is primarily my concern that the eagerness
of some people on hearing something they do not like to resort to
words like, racist,
anti-semitic, islamo-phobic, misogynistic,
trans-phobic, homo-phobic,
patriarchal or
hate speech, prevents reasoned discussion and, if we self censor to
avoid being so labelled, effectively denies us freedom of expression.
(It
is not without interest that the PCSO who had McAlpine arrested is
himself a homosexual.) But
in Stella Creasy’s case there is something else.
Creasy
is credited with having championed payday
loan fee caps and
more recently has urged a crackdown on high cost credit cards. I
admire this and say more power to her elbow. I
just wish she would not waste her time trying to solve a non-existent
problem. Perhaps she is not immune to vanity.
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