In the ever-expanding concept of ‘hate’, misogyny is set to become a ‘hate crime’. This was proposed by Labour MP Stella Creasy as an amendment to the government’s Voyeurism Bill, but withdrawn after receiving a promise from Theresa May’s Conservative-In-Name-Only government to review all hate crime legislation, Mrs May no doubt relishing the prospect of a bit of virtue-signalling to her chums at the BBC.

Weaponising the concept of hate for political purposes is a relatively new phenomenon, although you wouldn’t think it from the state of public discourse today. The content of most newspapers and the speech of the presenters on most mainstream media television news is drenched in the ideology of hate. There appears to be a genuine belief in the validity of the concepts of ‘hate crime’ and ‘hate speech’ – the belief that some crimes are worse than others if they are committed against members of certain protected groups, and and that saying anything which even faintly affects their ‘mental health’ is beyond the legal pale.

To normal right-thinking people a crime is a crime, and all crime is bad. Crimes have different motivations, but it is the action which is to be punished, not the motivation. That you cannot attribute motivation is why the criminal justice system must be kept as objective as possible. Only then are all equal before the law. This is true equality, and has been built up in our nation since the days of Magna Carta.

This understanding has been steadily eroded since the Western Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, though the seeds were already sown by Karl Marx’s divisive theories of societal conflict.

In the new paradigm of ‘hate crime’, however, people become more guilty if they belong to an oppressor group, and more of a victim if they belong to a group with protected characteristics. This utterly undermines the principle of equality before the law and leaves it in an asinine state, with motivation rather than action as the more important element of a crime. When some groups are entitled to superior justice and other groups are punished more harshly for the same action, then the whole system becomes flawed.

If misogyny were to be classed as a hate crime, then the police, Crown Prosecution Service and courts would consider that crimes by men against women are more serious than those by women against men, men against men or women against women. This is already the case in Nottinghamshire, where the police record misogyny as a hate crime. The proposed change in the law takes this one dangerous step further. It would allow prosecutors to pursue harsher sentences.

To compound the problem, the definition of hate crime requires no prima facie evidence of motivation. A hate crime is defined as ‘criminal behaviour where the perpetrator is motivated by hostility or demonstrates hostility towards the victim’s disability, race, religion, sexual orientation or transgender identity’. Thus the ‘hate’ element of a hate crime is based in the perception of the person who makes the accusation, or a third party who makes the report. Perception can be entirely subjective, so crimes which are flagged as hate crimes may be no such thing at all.

Crimes against women are terrible, but so are crimes against men. The result will be that a man wolf-whistling at a woman, perhaps in appreciation of her beauty, will be considered a hate criminal if the ‘victim’ of the wolf-whistling considers it so, but a man stabbing another man to death, which is obviously far more hateful, being violent and vicious, will not.

Of course for there to be any logic in this madness, if misogyny is to be a hate crime, then so should misandry. There should also be 71 other specific hate crimes for all the other genders which have been invented by the barmy proponents of genderqueer theory. The government will need to add new categories of hate crimes like butchophobia, demigirlphobia and androgynophobia in its hate crime review, and perhaps also caninophobia for those humans who identify as dogs.

There was, however, no parallel suggestion from Ms Creasy that misandry should be a hate crime. Even if there had been, it would still not create ‘balance’ let alone true equality before the law, as crimes committed between sexes would be considered to be more serious than crimes between people of the same sex.

The whole ludicrous idea of hate crime and hate speech should be dropped now, and we should revert to the sensible and objective notion that a crime is a crime. All crime is bad – yes, it has different motivations, but the crime should be punished, not the motivation. Otherwise, we will end up punishing a motivation even if there is no crime. Just such a frighteningly Orwellian definition of Hate Crime was suggested in a now-deleted tweet by Khan and Dick’s Metropolitan Police, which stated: ‘Though what the perpetrator has done may not be against the law, their reasons for doing it are. This means it may be possible to charge them with a crime.’ This is thought crime incarnate.

It is unbelievable that this ‘law’ can be contemplated when the police force is not even funded to do its basic job effectively – the pursuit of real crime. In a decade of one of the fastest population increases ever, due to record immigration and the challenges that poses, the police have been thinned out to the point where they lack the resources to investigate all reported crimes, let alone do preventive community policing. Only 3 per cent of reported burglaries today are solved.

At the same time police officer numbers in England and Wales have fallen by 21,000 in the eight years since 2010 – the period in which Theresa May has been both Home Secretary and Prime Minister – and there are now fewer police officers than at any time since 1981. Such Government neglect of its prior duty to protect its people and maintain law and order is arguably criminal in itself.

Today police are forced to prioritise crimes, often only investigating those considered ‘high priority’. Yet if a crime is flagged as a hate crime it is automatically prioritised, even if it is petty in nature. If you are a straight, white male and you want the police to investigate criminal damage or car crime, you may as well forget it. But if you are a BAME, LGBT, disabled Muslim trans-woman, your multiple protected characteristics will boost you to the top of the queue if you report the same incident as a hate crime.

Sentences for hate crimes normally result in a tougher sentence with the additional uplift on the sentence tariff. This is fundamentally unfair. But it allows the liberal elite to virtue-signal to their comrades whose brains have been pickled in cultural Marxism at re-education institutions once worthy of the name ‘universities’, understandably breeding a simmering resentment among the majority of the population who do not have protected characteristics as defined by the Equality Act 2010, and who do not have access to this new fast-track of justice.

Abolishing the destructive ideologies of hate crime, hate speech and thought crime does not mean that criminal justice must become ineffective. All sentences should be tough to act as a punishment and a deterrent, and all crime should be pursued, not just those designated as hate crime. Crime should be investigated and punished equally, and there should be the same sentence regardless of whether the criminal is a man or a woman, black or white, rich or poor, indigenous or immigrant. Only then will the justice system be effective, and only then will the law be fair and seen to be fair.