The Free Speech Union, created and led by the English writer Toby Young, is that rare concern which defends the beleaguered Brit when he gets a visit from the police for something called a “Non-Crime Hate Incident.” Our bobbies mysteriously seem to have all the time in the world to devote themselves to name-calling, which is what the vast majority of NCHIs entail. 

They recently turned up at a primary school not to cheerily instruct the kiddies on road safety, as was their wont in my youth, but to throw a scare into a nine-year-old who told another nine-year-old that he smelled.

I was amazed to read that there have been 13,000 NCHIs recorded this year alone. This comes at a time when violent crime is endemic in British cities, where machete fights are a common sight on the streets of the capital, and where antisemitic attacks are so regular that our Jewish citizens have been advised to hide symbols of their faith.

Some people have surmised that the men and women paid to stand between law-abiding citizens and lawless criminals have, like our other institutions, “lost their bottle,” as the Cockneys say, and become scared of actual criminals, so instead spend their time scolding people for being rude on the internet. 

“Misgendering” — calling a he a him when he wanted to be a her or compromising with the rather lovely “shim” was by 2020 a thought-crime and could get the most peaceful citizen a visit from a Plod*, to whom “PC” suddenly stood for “politically correct” as well as “Police Constable.”  Since then, hurty-feelings-related criminal complaints have spread like a shaving rash on a manly ankle stuffed into a two-sizes-too-small stripper-shoe. 

It is a mark of woke tyranny that the sinister and the silly often walk hand in hand, and this most surreal and scary societal clampdown is no exception. Mr. Young wrote in the Spectator of the police force that “recently dispatched two hapless officers to a journalist’s door to question her about a year-old tweet” as “a cross between the Keystone Cops and the Stasi.”

The animal kingdom often features in these NCHIs, mostly online; a Scottish MP, Murdo Fraser, received one for X-ing that “choosing to identify as ‘non-binary’ is as valid as choosing to identify as a cat,” while the barrister Sarah Phillimore tested the “lunacy” of NCHIs by surmising on her socials that “my cat may be a Methodist.”

As the system is “victim-based” and takes only one complaint — however daft — to be triggered, Ms. Phillimore asked a friend to complain to police that this suggested that “Methodists were wandering pests that defecate in people’s gardens.” It worked. Yet sometimes our dumb friends can be involved in face-to-face NCHIs.

Even before they were named, 20 years ago a tipsy student at Oxford spent the night in a cell and was fined after calling a police horse “gay.” When you think it can’t get any sillier, it does; last month the City of London recorded a bad haircut as a NCHI.

The police themselves must have an inkling of how ridiculous this makes them look. Recently the director of public prosecutions, Stephen Parkinson, cast doubt on their usefulness, noting that “Even within the police service there has been some surprise at the level of non-crime hate incidents that have been investigated.”

A local Police and Crime Commissioner questioned the resources deployed by his own force looking into 702 NCHIs between June 2023 and June 2024, asking “Is that necessarily a good use of time?” Yet the zealous, joyless Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper (think Verruca Salt joins the Cheka) seems plagued by the idea that someone, somewhere, is being cheeky, and has pledged to make it even easier to record mockery as hatred.

Even Santa isn’t safe from the Thought Police; two have just been sacked for being naughty, not nice; one of them has even had his online food bank donation drive halted. One bad Santa is guilty of posting the door of Number 10 Downing Street with the I and O of the word “idiot” replacing the numbers 1 and 0; the second of going on hunger strike over the summer to protest against illegal immigration.

The Christmas tree gifted to Britain from Norway to thank us for freeing them from tyranny stands in Trafalgar Square, 66 feet tall and waiting to be lit, as it has every year since 1947. We tend to believe that Christmas can’t be cancelled — though it has been before, in 1647, by the Puritans.

Carols will be sung and gifts exchanged and goodwill to all men, women, and gender-fluid non-binary persons will be heartily expressed. The feeling persists, though, that we will soon be living in that nasty era of Narnia where it is always winter — and never Christmas.

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* Flatfoot in American.