Hate crime

A mystery has occurred. In The Affluent People’s Republic of North London, a rabbi was stabbed on the street multiple times by a knifeman. Rabbi Alter Yaakov Schlesinger was rescued by two builders and a Deliveroo driver and is now in hospital, where hopefully he will recover. Apparently no robbery was attempted. The police, however, have said that this was not a terrorist incident, thus suggesting – by extension – it was also not a hate crime. A crime of love, or indifference, then? Who knows? All a mystery. A familiar mystery.

It is 178 years since the last recorded charge of blasphemy in Scotland, against the Edinburgh bookseller Thomas Paterson for ‘exhibiting placards of a profane nature’ in his shop window in 1842. One of those placards announced that ‘Paterson & Co (of the Blasphemy Depot, London)… Beg to acquaint infidels in general and Christians in particular that… [we] will sell all kinds of printed works which are calculated to enlighten, without corrupting — to bring into contempt the demoralising trash our priests palm upon the credulous as divine revelation — and to expose the absurdity of, as well as the horrible effects springing from, the debasing god-idea.

The Guardian ran a story on its website today headlined: ‘Hate crimes doubled in England and Wales in five years.’ Alarming if true, but is it? The story is based on some data released by the Home Office today which, on the face of it, does appear to show the number of hate crimes increasing. The number of hate crimes recorded by the police in England and Wales in 2018-19 was 103,397, up from 94,121 in 2017-18, a rise of ten per cent. But drill down into the report, and the picture becomes more hazy. The word doing most of the work here is ‘recorded’. Yes, the number of recorded hate crimes has increased year-on-year, but how do we know that isn’t due to the police being more likely to record hate crimes?

Well done to Sara Thornton, a senior police officer who has warned against extending the definition of a ‘hate crime’ to include misogyny, misandry and ageism. Yesterday, she told a conference of the National Police Chiefs’ Council and the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners that they should be allowed to focus on ‘core’ crimes like burglary, rather than being forced to increase the already ridiculous amount of time they spend investigating hate crimes. In 2016, British police detained and questioned 3,300 people for making ‘offensive’ comments on social media – roughly nine arrests per day.

Have you ever met a real misogynist? Probably not, because misogyny is a very strong word. Coming from the ancient Greek misos (hatred) and gyne (woman), it should only be used to define extreme behaviour: woman-hating to be exact.  And yet some people seem to think that British streets are full of woman-haters. Misogyny was made a hate crime in Nottingham two years ago, meaning that anyone caught wolfwhistling at women, being sexually explicit or generally mean to the fairer sex was liable to be investigated by the police as a woman-hater. This pilot scheme has been deemed to be a success; now some campaigners are calling for misogyny to be classed as a hate crime across the whole of the UK.

It took four days to actually see the pine marten in the flesh. We caught it on a trail cam on night two of our holiday as it scampered in an agreeably gamine manner for the food we’d left out. It ate better than us that week. By night three it had a choice of eggs (its favourite), peanut butter sandwiches and chopped-up frankfurters. All it needed was a nicely chilled Chablis. We sat in the dark for hours, waiting, until my wife said: ‘Fuck the malodorous little bastard, let’s watch TV.’ She is not much of one for wildlife really. And then it appeared, up on its hind legs crunching its way through the shell of an egg, tipping the yolk down its throat. Pale golden chest, long bushy tail, perky, impish face — we’d got our man.