Do you feel ten per cent more hateful than you did this time last year? Do you think the British public as a whole are ten per cent more unpleasant in 2019 as compared to 2018?

If you believe the latest ‘hate crimes’ stats, then you may come to such a ludicrous conclusion.

Figures compiled by the Home Office claim that there were 103,379 hate crimes committed last year. A record number, and up ten per cent on the year before. Various campaign groups disguised as charities insist that this is merely ‘the tip of the iceberg’.

To which one might say simply: ‘Of course they do.’ For if you are sane and reasonable you will realise that all of this is nonsense – nonsense, in fact, of the purest, most disgraceful kind: professional nonsense, cooked up to serve a political purpose.

It is time that purpose was identified and named.

The foundations of the hate crime hoax started 20 years ago with the Macpherson Report on the murder of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence. As well as its good effects, that inquiry had a number of negative consequences. Two stand out. The first was that an offence against a person of sexual or ethnic minority became a crime of greater seriousness than a crime against someone of no minority group.

So if an old woman was hit over the head for her purse, that was just a crime. But if someone who was gay or black was hit over the head then that was not just a crime but a hate crime. A two-tier system of offence was created in which some crimes (with an identical effect upon the victim) were deemed worse than others.

Doreen and Neville Lawrence, the parents of murdered black teenager Stephen. Doreen Lawrence can be seen holding the Macpherson report which stated that a crime was a hate crime if it was ‘perceived by the victim or any other person as being motivated by malice or ill-will towards a social group’

But the second development was more damaging, still: Macpherson stated that a crime was a hate crime if it was ‘perceived by the victim or any other person as being motivated by malice or ill-will towards a social group’.

So if I get hit over the head I might be the victim of a bog-standard crime. But if I am hit over the head and think, or pretend to think, that it is because of my homosexuality, then we are in the realm not just of crime but of hate crime. And that means the sirens of the modern police force can really go off.

In the years since the Macpherson Report, the British police have done everything they can to prove that they are on the beat with this new orthodoxy.

They don’t just want to find hate crimes. They need to find hate crimes. Some years ago a friend of mine was accosted on a train late at night by a couple of rowdy drunks. Reporting the matter to police at the next station, the officers positively begged him to report it (once they found out he was gay) as a ‘hate crime’. He insisted that there was no such element to their abuse. The police seemed desperate to persuade him otherwise.

That is just one of the reasons why the statistics on hate crimes keep going up and up. The police want them. They want to be able to report them. They positively advertise for them.

In case anyone thinks that is an exaggeration, consider the pathetic video released by DCC Julie Cooke of Cheshire Constabulary. It took the form of an online message for ‘pronoun day’, which she described as ‘a day which is particularly important to people who identify as transgender or gender non-conforming’. Cooke wittered on: ‘Being misgendered can have a huge impact on somebody and their personal well-being. It can also be used as a form of abuse.’

And here is one of the problems of this form of touting for business. The Home Office’s statistics claim that, in the past year, ‘transphobic hate crimes’ rose by 37 per cent. That is a pretty horrific number – like all the other rising hate crimes numbers. Until you dig one centimetre beneath the surface. What exactly constitutes a transphobic hate crime? Murder? Mugging? Burglary? Well, once again we have to remember that these crimes are in the eye of the beholder. And consider just one such beholder from only a few days ago.

DCC Julie Cooke of Cheshire Constabulary, pictured, released a 'pathetic' video for ‘pronoun day’, in which she said 'being misgendered can have a huge impact on somebody and their personal well-being. It can also be used as a form of abuse'

Ria Cooper is a glamour model based in Hull, who ten years ago (at the age of 15) became Britain’s youngest transgender woman. Other than that, there is no reason why the nation at large should have heard of her. Except that earlier this month it emerged that Ms Cooper recently contacted Humberside Police to tell them of a set of WhatsApp messages she had received she was reporting as ‘transphobic’. What were these messages? Well, they were from a photographer whom Cooper accuses of trying to scupper her modelling career.

The photographer reportedly pointed out that Cooper has a penis, which was not the sort of lady he was after. Cooper calls this ‘f****** disgusting behaviour’ and deemed it ‘transphobic’. So there is another ‘hate crime’ just there.

Of course, campaigning groups long-ago cottoned on to the fact that all of this suits their interests. I suspct that sometimes that interest is commercial.

The remaining LGBT organisations in Britain have relatively little to do with their time. Their battles are largely won, and presumably their careers and pension plans are at risk from this success.

So ‘rising hate crimes’ must provide a massive business opportunity for these groups. Other groups also benefit from this marketplace of grievance.

Last month, when Parliament returned to spend a couple more days bickering about Brexit, Labour MPs used the opportunity to attack the Prime Minister. On what? Why hate crimes of course. The ridiculous, fulminating MPs kept pretending that Britain is in the midst of a hate crimewave and that the PM himself is responsible.

Labour MP Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi and others insisted that Boris’s column last year defending the right of Muslim women to wear the burka (a column his opponents deliberately misrepresented) in fact caused a ‘spike’ in anti-Muslim hate crimes. They claim that such hate crimes rose 375 per cent in the week after his column.

Labour MP Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi and others insisted that Boris’s column last year defending the right of Muslim women to wear the burka (a column his opponents deliberately misrepresented) in fact caused a ‘spike’ in anti-Muslim hate crimes. They claim that such hate crimes rose 375 per cent in the week after his column

Which sounds impressive until you realise this is a rise from eight reported incidents in a week to 38 reported incidents. Scepticism has been poured on these figures.

Labour MPs who were attacking the Prime Minister with these bogus statistics were only using the favoured tactic of recent years.

For the fact is that since the Brexit vote there has been a huge number of ways in which people opposed to the result have assailed the British public.

We have been called stupid, ignorant, gullible and more. But perhaps the favourite claim of all has been the claim that the Brexit vote unleashed a tidal wave of hate in the British public. Anti-Brexit campaigners repeatedly pretended that the tragic murder of a Polish man called Arek Jozwik in Harlow in August 2016 was a result of the referendum. The resulting trial found that the murder was a squalid and mundane event with no link whatsoever to Brexit. But that is par for the course.

In the wake of the referendum there have been claims that British voters celebrated the result by a wave of hate crimes against ethnic and sexual minorities. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is no country in the world more tolerant than this one. Yet time and again in the past 20 years – and never more so than since the referendum – we have been slandered and smeared.

Political campaigners have used bogus statistics to push their own political and sectarian interests. It is time that people named and shamed the smear-merchants. There are bigots out there, as there are in every country. But this is not a bigoted country. And we have the right to vote how we want to vote without being defamed as such.

If there was one wave all sensible people should wish for in the near future it should be a wave of scepticism about the claims of campaigners whose only interest is in doing down this country.

A country which has justifiable pride in our tolerance and should exercise a healthy dose of scepticism towards our critics.