the brilliantly leaping gazelle

In my last post I referred to Eddie Izzard as Eddie Izzard.  I’d  ‘deadnamed’ him – the notion that referring to someone by their birth name, as opposed to using a name that better suited their new identity – is as akin a ‘hate crime’ But I think I’m on safe ground here. According to his wikipedia page, he does’t much care. 

Others do, though, and that’s a problem because we now live in an age where how someone feels about something can be land one in hot water. Non-Crime Hate Incidents (NCHI’s) have been in the news recently because of the arrest last year of Daily Telegraph journalist Alison Pearson over a tweet she sent a couple of years earlier in which she mistook some British Pakistani protesters for pro-Hamas protesters and railed against ‘Jew haters’. That Pearson promptly deleted it soon after posting apparently made no difference.

Someone saw that tweet – and for reasons best known to them, waited two years before complaining to the police – and in so doing, set in motion the sort of over-reaction that I thought only happened in former Communist states. It took the combined investigative abilities of three different police forces, including one of them setting up a ‘gold group’– normally reserved for major or terrorist crimes – before concluding that no crime had taken place.

Introduced in 2014, more than 130,000 NCHI’s have been issued. And if you don’t remember a a huge debate about them raging in the press, interminable parliamentary wrangling, all manner of public protest, don’t worry. It was’t like you weren’t paying attention. There wasn’t anything to pay attention to. Because as befits something as nebulous as a NCHI, its very passage into British law is opaque at best and Kafkaesque at worst.

As a result of his inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence,  Sir William MacPherson recommended that the that Police should record both hate crimes and non-criminal “hate incidents”. Exactly how something that is a non crime somehow requires the police to get involved is beyond me. But nonetheless, the result was that without any sort of anything, eventually in 2014, the College of Policing released its Hate Crime Operational Guidance that encouraged reporting non-crime hate incidents. As far as I can make out that’s basically what happened. The police decided it would be handy thing to have should they need it and everyone just went along with it. It was only in 2023 it got any sort of parliamentary attention and that was only limited as to how NCHI’s were recorded and stored, rather than their possible effect on free speech or potential for misuse.

And the threshold for something to be classed as NCHI is worrying low. All someone has to think is that because they possess a particular characteristic – their race, religion, sexuality disability or transgender identity – and that an incident occurred occurred wholly or partially because they perceive it to have been motivated by a prejudice because of that protected characteristic, then that’s enough. Even a third party a third party, who may have just have overheard or seen what it was – as in Alison Pearsons case – can report it.

This gives rise to what I call emotional inflation, the exaggeration of harm or to be more exact, the deliberate and maliciously inflated perception of their own feelings. Someone being a bit brusque or tetchy, terse or just a bit off with you doesn’t leave you feeling irked, miffed, vexed, or slightly irritated, possibly out of sorts for a few minutes or even in a bad mood. With NCHI’s these feelings transform into being triggered, anxious, threatened, fearful, distressed, certainly at risk of self harming, possibly suicidal and many other unprovable, yet sufficiently now conditions that help reinforce victimhood and prove that something needs to be done.

But in so doing, NCHI’s help create the very problem they ostensibly seek to solve. Because as soon as you elevate how someone feels about something above some else’s right to free speech, one legitimizes subjectivity, fosters a grievance culture and allows the law ever more power to police of personal actions. Because as we’ve see over the last few years, some trans-activists have become increasingly aware of the malicious potential that NCHI’s offer and have quite deliberately sought to amplify their feelings into something warranting police intervention. 

Why the police simply don’t tell them to ‘man up’ I’m not sure, but then they’re men that want to be women, aren’t they?