Our politicised “woke” police must be brought under control

“In this country we have never had a Cheka, a Gestapo or a Stasi. We have never lived in an Orwellian society.” Not to worry – that deficiency is diligently being repaired by our “woke” police.

The words of Mr Justice Julian Knowles quoted above – an unusual statement of common sense from today’s judicial bench – were part of his decision in a judicial review brought by Harry Miller against Humberside Police for insisting on recording a supposedly “transphobic” tweet he had published as a “hate incident”, even though the police admitted it was not a crime.

The judge said: “I find the combination of the police visiting the claimant’s place of work, and their subsequent statements in relation to the possibility of prosecution, were a disproportionate interference with the claimant’s right to freedom of expression because of their potential chilling effect.”

He ruled that Miller’s tweets, to which Humberside Police had taken exception, “were lawful and that there was not the slightest risk that he would commit a criminal offence by continuing to tweet”. Harry Miller himself is a former Humberside police officer and the founder and CEO of Fair Cop, an organisation that campaigns for freedom of expression. He claims that the constable who telephoned him said “I need to check your thinking”, though the officer denies this. In any case, it was clearly what he was doing.

Since what Miller had done was not a crime – and the police acknowledged that fact – why was it recorded in police records as a “non-crime hate incident”? Non-crimes are not the business of the police: crimes are. In 2019 in the Humberside police area 31,841 violent crimes were committed. Yet officers apparently have leisure to visit the workplaces of non-criminals and harangue them on the telephone over tweets that offend their PC sensibilities.

It has now emerged that police forces in England and Wales have recorded almost 120,000 “non-crime hate incidents” since guidelines were issued in 2014 by the College of Policing. These records can show up in DBS (Disclosure and Barring Service) checks and may prevent the person named from getting a job. So large is the scale of this Stasi-style (to invoke the judge’s metaphor) archive it seems inevitable that a significant number of non-offenders may have failed to gain employment.

Despite their zeal in pursuing non-crimes, our police are less successful in tackling actual crime. In the year from March 2018 to March 2019, the proportion of crimes in England and Wales resulting in a prosecution fell to just 7.8%, a new low and half the rate for 2014-2015. In other words, 92.2% of crimes were committed with impunity. That shocking figure does not reflect a society governed by the rule of law: it is the public order record of a failed state.

Over that period there were 43,516 knife crimes in England and Wales (excluding Greater Manchester). Knife crime is rife in London, yet the Metropolitan Police has 900 officers sitting at computers trawling for “hate” offences. In 2017-2018 just 3.6 per cent of burglaries were solved by the police; for the heroes of Humberside Police the figure was 2.2 per cent. “Burglary is a priority for us,” said a spokesman for Humberside Police at the time, “and we are determined to catch and convict the criminals who are responsible for this terrible crime.”

One wonders what the clear-up rate for crimes that are not a priority must be. Nationally, the reality is that the police have effectively decriminalised offences such as burglary. Crimes that are too much trouble to solve have been legalised by the police without reference to Parliament. Instead, they are focused on “hate” crime – a purely ideological concept that demonstrates how heavily politicised the police have become. They are “woke”.

Above all, they are focused on the so-called crime of “transphobia”. This manufactured, propagandist term is designed to demonise anyone who articulates the objective scientific truth that human beings cannot change biological sex. For centuries, since the Pseudo-Enlightenment, the Left tried to conscript science into its camp. Darwin was an icon for “progressives”, Marx proclaimed the inevitable triumph of what proved to be the oxymoron “scientific socialism”.

Scientism became a key feature of leftist propaganda. As recently as the early stages of the climate Grande Peur, when “anthropogenic global warming” was the supposed threat, alarmists sought to recruit scientists to their cause via bribery, peer pressure and career intimidation, to support their assertion that “the science is settled”. How very different today’s “woke” landscape is.

So far from being prayed in aid, science is contradicted, spurned and discounted. For the extremist fanatics of cultural Marxism this is a much more satisfactory situation. The acronym “LGBT” is now a complete sham: so far from being a coalition of people with parallel interests, its component elements are violently at war with one another. This is due to the “woke” insistence that “transgender” claims trump all others, no matter how seriously they were promoted quite recently.

The reason lies in the psychopathology of Marxist totalitarianism. Homosexuality is real, it exists, it is a fact of life: as such, when leftists make political gains on its behalf they are simply securing an advantage for one faction within society, like a trade union gaining higher status for its members. It does not mark a spectacular ideological victory.

Transgenderism, on the other hand, is based on a fiction: that human beings can change biologcial sex. It is contradicted by the scientific evidence of chromosomes, DNA, etc. It follows, therefore, that to overthrow science and enthrone “trans” dogma as an orthodoxy to which the whole of society must conform, with nonconformity subject to criminal sanctions, would represent the ultimate triumph of ideology over every other belief system – science, religion, whatever.

Totalitarians have always gained the greatest satisfaction from imposing fictions or downright lies upon subject populations: myths about tractor production, racial superiority, et al. Every helot in North Korea knew that Kim Il Sung, founder of that hallucinatory state, set out the stars in the heavens every evening. We used to laugh at such absurdity. Now, comparable mythology holds sway in Britain, primarily in our universities – our ancient seats of learning.

The lunatics have taken over the asylum and now they have also taken over the police. This dangerous totalitarian tendency must be snuffed out and freedom of expression restored to what was formerly the freest country on earth. The police snoopers on Humberside and elsewhere claim they are enforcing guidelines issued in 2014 by the College of Policing. It must be reasserted that Britain is not governed by guidelines issued by professional bodies but by statutes enacted by Parliament.

Parliament must remedy this situation. First, it needs to repeal or drastically amend Labour’s Equality Act 2010. The categories of persons with “protected characteristics” need to be abolished and true equality under the law restored. We have not had privileged orders with protected characteristics in this country since the days of the Norman barons lording it over Saxon churls.

Similarly, the concept of “aggravated” offences must be abolished: it is based on the prejudices of progressive bigotry and destroys the hard-won constitutional principle of equality under the law. “Hate crime” is a purely ideological notion, based on the biased perceptions of “woke” extremists. It should be purged from our legal system.

But the immediate priority is to bring our out-of-control political police to heel; to halt their aggressions against freedom of expression; to force them to address real crime, as the public demands, not non-crime as a virtue-signalling charade. This may take new legislation and radical reform within the ranks of the police. If so, it must be made a government priority. In five years’ time Boris Johnson’s government will be judged not merely on its revival of the North, but also its restoration of traditional British freedoms and how effectively it has rescued the country from cultural Marxist tyranny.