What is hate?

If this Labour government deserves to be remembered for anything at all, it will be for the systematic stamping out of freedoms that have been enjoyed in this country for centuries. Smoking in public is now all but certain to be banned. Habeas corpus has been curtailed by Charles Clarke’s grotesque ‘control orders’. This week in Parliament, Labour simultaneously announced the abridgement of the right to trial by jury, and forced through an almost mediaeval erosion of free speech, in the form of the ban on incitement to ‘religious hatred’. This is a contemptibly bad measure, which has nothing to do with the needs of criminal justice, and everything to do with politics. It is the result of Labour’s pathetic pre-electoral attempt to appease an alienated Muslim community by offering a new protection against ‘Islamophobia’, and it is therefore part of the continuing price we are all paying, in loss of civil liberties, for the Iraq war.