Short of modern China’s mass surveillance society, communist East Germany was perhaps one of the most spied-upon in history. Combining typical communist paranoia with Teutonic efficiency, the Stasi secret police deployed twelve times as many secret police officers per head as the Gestapo. Worse, with an informal network of snitches spreading an even wider net, as many as one in 30 East Germans was a Stasi informer. One in three citizens had an open Stasi file kept on them.
The Stasi were amateurs compared to the modern Thought Police.
In October 2020 the College of Policing replaced the existing Hate Crimes Operational Guidance with Authorised Professional Practice Guidance on Hate Crime (“APPGHC”)[…but] the police continue to claim they are building a vital database of intelligence to inform their operational priorities and allocation of scarce resources. They claim it is vitally important to keep an eye on those of us likely to ‘escalate’ into criminality. I believe however it is much more likely that they risk being led by the nose by the hysterical or the actively malicious, and that the information they are gathering is worse than useless.
None of us are any safer for all this. On the contrary, there must be a serious risk that many of the 120,000+ people whose ‘hate incidents’ have been recorded since the first HCOG was introduced in 2015 are very much less safe. They have been recorded secretly as ‘hateful’ on a false and irrational basis, their alleged misdemeanours retained on a police database with obvious implications for employment prospects when these incidents are revealed on a DBS check.
Note that none of this is actually a crime. Police are keeping an active database of hundreds of thousands of Britons’ “non-crimes”. And they’re doing it in complete secrecy, in direct contravention of some of the foundational principles of Common Law, dating back before the Magna Carta.
In July 2020 I wrote to Wiltshire police requesting they reveal to me what ‘hate incidents’ were recorded against me. They obliged. A ‘hate incident’ had been recorded against my name in February 2020 for ‘hate’ against religious and transgender people. The police report was stark; ‘a barrister who has been publishing hate…’
I was never told. I was given no opportunity to challenge or defend myself. The 12 pages of tweets contained much repetition and went back as far as October 2017 – someone had clearly been assiduous in their harvesting of my ‘hate’.
Someone. So much for the principle of being able to confront your accusers.
The bar for “hate” is also ridiculously low.
South Yorkshire Police have also recorded me for religious hate for commenting that my cat might be a Methodist. That latter report was kindly made by a Twitter colleague at my behest, to deliberately test the lunacy of this system. When he was asked why he thought my comment so hateful, he replied that I meant to imply Methodists were wandering pests that defecate in people’s gardens. South Yorkshire, with a straight face, duly recorded.
This is the same police force, remember, who knowingly ignored, indeed covered up, the systematic, industrial-scale rape of underage white girls by Muslim gangs.
Apparently, raping a child because of their skin colour and religion isn’t “hate”.
Just don’t call your cat a Methodist.
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