‘Thought Crime’ ~ Policing in England today
by Gavin Ashenden:
I had no idea when I read George Orwell’s 1984 as a teenager, how it would turn out to be an even more important book towards the end of my life than it was at the beginning.
He warned of how a state setting out to control its citizens would do it by manipulating language. He called it doublethink. And the media would follow the same pattern with what he called ‘Newspeak.’ Slowly but surely the reality of things would be hidden by language that covered the truth with a fog.
Each week the news brings more of what we experience as doublespeak in the media. Hate crimes are one of the most corrupting and dangerous ones.
At first sight, it seems almost beyond belief that a police force could decide that thought crime was more important than actual crime.
But in England, that’s what’s happening.
Take for example South Yorkshire police. They have a particularly poor record of dealing with real crime. It was that force that decided to humiliate Cliff Richard by calling in the press helicopter to cover their break in on his house, even though he was innocent. It was they who covered up over the true record of the Hillsborough disaster. And currently, it was they who ignored the mass rape of the Rotherham teenage white girls, by predatory groups of men from one distinctive faith community (known amongst some commentators as the ‘Voldemort community’ – the faith that the media dare not or will not name.)
So it’s particularly odd that they should start to invest resources in examining hate crimes that don’t even pass the threshold of crime. What should these incidents be called? ‘Unverified incidents of existential bruising causing inconvenient emotional tenderness to people who victimised by them?’
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