Legislation having to do with defining crimes and punishments should stick to the realm of behavioural fact that can be determined without reference to perception of feelings aroused in the heart of the ‘victim’. Plenty of crimes are motivated by hate. When one person murders another because the victim slept with the murder’s spouse, this is hate. When one gang shoots up another gang’s members or headquarters, this too is hate. Crimes against religious groups have been perpetrated for millennia whether Catholics against protestants, protestants against Catholics, Muslims against non-muslims or vice versa etc. These too are motivated by hate. Many other examples could be called upon to prove this point. The point is that these have always been crimes and do not need to be a special category under ‘hate crimes’. My concern is that the hate crimes category simply lends itself to being abused to broaden the reach of regular legislation to anything that the ‘victim’ subjectively perceives to be hateful or offensive. This type of legislation will jam up our police resources and court system with complaints and investigations unnecessarily. Legislation needs to judge actions and not the realm of feelings / perceptions. Hate crime legislation runs the risk of being leveraged to shut down or cancel opinions, discussions and even protests against other people’s views and lifestyles simply on the basis of the way these are perceived or make the receiving party feel. Where will the boundaries be? If I cut someone off in traffic and they become enraged with me and give me the middle finger and some choice angry words, have they committed a hate crime? Can I report this as a hate crime? Maybe not. What if they ram my vehicle? Is this a hate crime? Maybe it is. But there is already legislation that would deem this to be an illegal and criminal activity independently of any hate crime legislation being introduced. Perhaps we could say that a wide range of crime is already a manifestation of hate without the need for specific hate crime legislation. So what is the real agenda behind the introduction of hate crime legislation?

I THOUGHT WE WERE OVER WOKISM, SILLY ME FOR THINKING THAT.

Every day I’m fearful of the next outrage that some virtuous delusional organization wants to inflict on us.

We must have proper justice on real crime not just words !

These recent moves towards subjectivity place powerful mechanisms of censorship in the hands of an unelected elite. Freedom of speech is the currency of democratic society – without open debate, we become an intolerant autocracy .

Hate speech surely is nothing more than a matter of opinion!