Online abuse is vile. But it’s NOT on a par with being attacked in the street

AN ARTICLE in yesterday’s Guardian called for a surge in prosecutions against anyone suspected of committing ‘hate crime’ on social media.

The author wants to see online abuse taken as seriously as assault or daubing vile graffiti on people’s houses.

‘Hate is hate,’ she tells us. And, reaching for another cliche, ‘victims should not be left to suffer in silence.’

She makes no distinction between proven hate crimes — that is, those that result in an actual conviction — and complaints about ‘hate crimes’, which may be justified, but are just as likely to be paranoid, malicious or frivolous.

You may shrug and say: what do you expect from The Guardian? But here’s the scary bit. The author is Alison Saunders, Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), the most senior public prosecutor in England and Wales.

If she wants a wave of prosecutions against people accused of writing abusive comments on social media, she’s likely to get her way.

Sadistic

The results would be disastrous. If we send police officers after online trolls, and paralyse the criminal justice system while their cases are processed, who really benefits?

The answer is simple: genuinely dangerous criminals, who can put their feet up while the police spend hours interviewing alleged online offenders and the people who’ve been moved to complain by a rude tweet or Facebook comment.

I don’t mean to make light of the sadistic behaviour of those who torment innocent members of the public, politicians or celebrities. Such behaviour is inexcusable.

No one should have to suffer the poisonous anti- Semitic abuse that the Labour MP for Liverpool Wavertree, Luciana Berger, endured last year. Her persecutor, Joshua BonehillPaine, was quite rightly jailed for two years.

And this year’s General Election campaign was disfigured by racist, sexist, religious and homophobic abuse and intimidation, including death threats. Some of the abuse was aimed at Labour MPs by rival factions on the hard Left.

But the perpetrators account for only a tiny minority of social media traffic, and surely the point is that we already devote appropriate resources to tracking them down.

Ms Saunders cites the case of Rhodri Philipps, the 4th Viscount St Davids, who was jailed for 12 weeks last month for writing on Facebook that he would pay £5,000 to anyone who ran over Gina Miller, the anti-Brexit campaigner.

Philipps is a chortling, snooty racist. He wasn’t planning an assassination, but he deserved to be prosecuted. And he has been. But Ms Saunders is planning sweeping changes that encompass alleged offences far less clear-cut than Philipps’s sinister ‘joke’.

I emphasise the word ‘alleged’ because the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) already defines hate crime as ‘ any offence which is per

ceived by the victim, or any other person, to be motivated by a hostility or prejudice’.

This created a ludicrous situation last year when the Home Secretary Amber Rudd’s speech to the Tory party conference was investigated as a ‘hate crime’ after an Oxford academic — who wasn’t even there — complained about what he felt was its anti-immigrant message three months later. (West Midlands police found no evidence of a hate crime but recorded it as a ‘noncrime hate incident’.)

Ms Saunders cannot see how crazy this is — she embraces the Alice-in-Wonderland political correctness in which ‘perceiving’ something as an offence is enough to make it one. Alas, that should hardly surprise us. Ms Saunders, 56, is far more right-on than her predecessor as DPP, Sir Keir Starmer — and he now sits on Jeremy Corbyn’s front bench.

This is a woman who rarely misses an opportunity to polish her liberal halo, air her PC credentials, and generate self-regarding headlines in sympathetic publications.

She blew her top earlier this year when a Crown Court judge, Philip Shorrock, accused the CPS of bringing too many prosecutions for rape that involved men and women who had been drunk or under the influence of drugs when the supposed attack took place.

Since no one could corroborate the claims, juries usually dismissed the allegations. Judge Shorrock asked why the CPS was so eager to bring charges in such cases. Ms Saunders accused him of ‘victimblaming’ that gave a free rein to ‘sexual predators’.

She’s on a mission when it comes to these ‘sexual predators’. In 2015, she prompted outrage and derision when she insisted that any woman who woke up in a man’s bed with no memory of the night before should consider the possibility she’d been raped.

Ms Saunders also championed Britain’s first Female Genital Mutilation prosecution — against a male London hospital doctor, Dhanuson Dharmasena. She announced after he was charged that she wanted to bring more such cases. It took a jury 25 minutes to acquit Dr Dharmasena.

Atrocity

Hyperbole is one of Ms Saunders’s trademarks; her latest article for The Guardian reeks of overblown indignation.

She tells us that online abuse is a ‘frontline’ crime comparable to the scenes last week in Charlottesville, Virginia, where white supremacists clashed with anti-racism protesters — and even to the Islamist atrocity in Barcelona.

Yet she shrinks from defining this abuse, because, of course, only the victim can do that.

This is the foundation for her grandiose plans to expand the prosecution of social media ‘hate crime’. Ms Saunders fails to see — or care — that any large-scale diversion of police and court resources can only benefit the perpetrators of real crimes, such as Islamist terrorists, cyber- criminals, child abusers and street thugs.

Nor does she grasp a point obvious to anyone with experience of dealing with internet trolls, as I did when I edited blogs for a national newspaper. Most people who spew hatred online are pathetic.

Although they are usually too gutless to use their real names, they crave the attention of their imagined enemies. And they’ll be thrilled by the thought that they have panicked the Director of Public Prosecutions into acting to change the law.

That said, the more devious among them will have no difficulty escaping detection one way or another.

Grievances

The dimwits will be caught — but deciding whether they’ve broken the law will involve a colossal effort by law enforcement authorities.

Meanwhile, Ms Saunders’s questionable definition of what constitutes a hate crime will encourage everyone to think of themselves as victims.

It’s beautifully tailored for Leftie lawyers who make a fortune by nurturing their clients’ grievances, and who, according to new CPS policy documents, will have a smorgasboard of ‘ hate crimes’ to choose from. These include ‘biphobic hate crime’, aimed at bisexual people who apparently have ‘different needs and experiences compared with those suffering anti-gay and transphobic offences’.

Britain’s public sector is bursting at the seams with professional offence-takers who can’t pop out for a pint of milk without being outraged at something. They share Ms Saunders’s view that ‘ left unchallenged, even low-level offending can fuel hostility’.

Under normal circumstances, a Tory government would tell the DPP that she’s overstepped the mark. Yet it seems no minister is willing to take her on.

I’m tempted to call for the sacking of this sanctimonious woman. But I won’t because hate crimes are defined by the victims, Ms Saunders has a notoriously thin skin, and I don’t want the coppers knocking at the door.