A docker from Hull likes a tweet which contains a poem about transgender issues. Someone complains to the police. A police officer rings the man’s employer and subsequently has a conversation with the docker, who is, apparently, an ex-policeman.
The police officer confirms the docker has committed no crime and that the matter will be recorded as a “hate incident”. The police officer tells the docker he is concerned about what he may be thinking. Hence 1984 truly arrives in our politically correct world, the police are now interested in “wrong think”.

To me, one alarming fact to arise from this is that the police officer says he has been on a course where he was taught that in the womb, brains and bodies can develop different sexes and that is where transgender issues arise. I do not even know if this is true, but what on earth is going on. In my days as a trainee police officer, we were taught about rape, murder, burglary and the like. It seems that policing has got a lot more complex and nebulous.

The problem starts with the fact that the police pay any attention to social media at all. It is not the real world yet seems to get a disproportionate amount of what these days is a very scarce resource.

Personally, I deplore the perversion of police priorities that has emerged in the last 20 years. No wonder the public are losing faith in the police when they will not even investigate a domestic burglary but have the time and resources to pursue none hate crime. I feel a certain amount of shame as the force involved was the one I retired from.

To use a rather pejorative phrase sometimes used in my day “Have they got nothing better to do?”

For Britain would abolish the concept of hate crime and concentrate on policing that matters to the public.

Mike Speakman

Mike Speakman is a retired Deputy Chief Constable and policing spokesman for the For Britain Movement.