This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

As an extremist, I am very worried about the planned Extremism Bill, which our Prime Minister is about to ram through Parliament.

So should you be. You are probably extremists, too, or will soon become extremists.

You may well remember when many opinions now viewed as despicable and more or less criminal were freely expressed – often by the same people and media who now condemn them.

I certainly do. Much of the conservative patriotic Christianity which my parents’ generation saw as normal has now been driven underground, and those who express it – especially in the public sector – face discipline or the sack, and are sometimes prosecuted.

Many of the current establishment’s attacks on Labour aren’t disagreements among free people in a free society. They are demands for abject recantations expressed by people who clearly think such views should not be allowed.

And the expression ‘extremism’ doesn’t mean anything objective or measurable. It just means a view that is out of favour with the current government and establishment.

What’s more, new and startling evidence from France (barely noticed here) suggests strongly that all these ‘anti-extremist’ strategies are wholly useless anyway for their main stated purpose.

It’s not the robed and bearded Islamist zealots we need to fear at all. An undercover French journalist, who infiltrated a jihadi cell in Paris, described those he found there as ‘fast-food Islamists’ who knew nothing of their supposed religion.

‘I never saw any Islam in this affair,’ the reporter told Canal+ TV. The cell members had ‘no will to improve the world’ but were ‘lost, frustrated, suicidal, easily manipulated youths’.

This is what I have been pointing out for many months. Track the backgrounds of the perpetrators of these crimes, here and abroad, and you do not find fanatical Wahhabi hard men, trained in the arts of death.

You find, almost invariably, low-life drifters in a haze of dope, on the borders of mental illness (and sometimes beyond it), capable of murder because they have fried their brains for so long that they no longer know right from wrong, or fantasy from reality. Some of these commit crimes which they then justify with a political purpose; many just commit crimes.

This is where we should be looking – and what we should be discouraging by enforcing our criminal laws properly.

Yet, instead, we waste our time and destroy our freedom by futile attempts to control what people think.

Poor Maxine’s not shocking anyone

Someone should tell the BBC that nobody is actually shocked any more by lesbian kisses. They’re so common now, verging on the compulsory, that I’m surprised

when they don’t feature in the weather forecast. I absolutely decline to be shocked.

So poor old Maxine Peake, who has to perform one of these osculations as Titania, left, in a new production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is wasting her time.

The desire to shock us has taken over drama. So, apart from the same-sex snogging, Richard III (or Julius Caesar, or Henry V, or Coriolanus) dresses in Nazi uniform, Hamlet’s a girl (Maxine Peake again), War And Peace has incest in it, Sherlock Holmes is a bad copy of Doctor Who, and it can’t be long before someone stages a version of Peter Pan played entirely by pensioners, or A Christmas Carol in which Scrooge is the hero and Christmas never happens.

Is it possible that the people who do these things haven’t understood that the books and plays they spoil were perfectly good and interesting before they meddled with them? It is. They’re taking a free ride on top of someone else’s talent and genius.

The really shocking thing these days is a production of anything which sticks to the text.

Butchering our lovely language

I had a proper old-fashioned education, and I have forgotten almost all of it, apart from the times tables and poems learned by heart, which I still use every day, the passable French vocabulary, which sometimes comes in handy, and a bit of geography.

My mother taught me to read, using what I now know was synthetic phonics. The Latin has almost all gone. The history was a good starting point, but I loved it anyway and have carried on learning it ever since. I must be one of the last people alive who had to sit for hours doing parsing and analysis of English sentences. It has never been any use to me at all, and I make my living by writing.

But until last week, I had no idea what a digraph is. Having found out, I have now deliberately forgotten. English is not Latin, and its beautiful, flexible, living architecture is best learned by being read to, and then by reading.

Yet many children never learn to read properly and are never read to. This is what the schools should be doing, not pestering the poor things with wearisome fronted adverbials and dreary trigraphs. You might as well try to explain the beauty of a goldfinch by killing it, pickling it and cutting it up on a slab – when all you need to do is to see the lovely bird in flight, full of grace and truth.

As I write this, news has just been brought to me that the Conservatives have retained control of Basingstoke, which fails to thrill. But the word ‘control’ is important. A small number of votes can decide whether someone keeps or loses enormous amounts of power over money, lawmaking, people, war and peace.

So our voting system should surely be absolutely fair and beyond reproach. I think it used to be. But apart from recent sordid scandals over postal voting, which never got the attention they should have done, we now have major new worries.

One is the very serious accusation that the Tory Party broke legal spending limits by bussing supporters into target seats. If big money is to be allowed to decide elections, then we are absolutely lost. And the other is the Third World chaos on Thursday at polling stations in one part of Greater London, with properly registered voters turned away by officials. I foresee worse problems in the EU referendum, especially as so many people have yet to realise they are not on the new voting roll, thanks to a major change in the registration rules, which has been poorly advertised. If this happens, and there is a close result, will the losers respect it? And then what?

A broken voting system can poison the whole country. Severe reforms are needed, and fast.

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