Sorry, ladies, men being boorish is not a hate crime

YESTERDAY was International Women’s Day and female MPs marked the occasion by having a Commons debate about turning misogyny into a hate crime.

There was no talk of turning misandry (contempt for men) into a hate crime, an oversight which should get them all locked up in sexist jail, but never mind.

scottish Nationalist MP Mhairi Black used the C-word five times to illustrate exactly the kind of abuse she gets online and in the post.

recently, Diane abbott did the same thing, although she was a little more polite than Mhairi — but who isn’t?

stella Creasy wanged on about how awful it is being a woman on Twitter, while Grimsby MP Melanie Onn called for street harassment against women to be classified as a hate crime.

The Labour front-bencher is demanding a change in the law so that wolf-whistling, leering and sexual comments made in public are investigated by police.

Has anyone asked the police about this?

as many stretched forces don’t have the time to investigate burglaries and domestic robberies, I can’t see them getting enthusiastic about Merv the Perv wolf-whistling at a fruity girl he spotted in the High street.

HOWEVER, many women will be looking for a sprightly response to reports of upskirting, down-blousing and ‘whoopsadaisy is that the time’, and ‘my, you don’t get many of those to the pound’.

Two years ago, a pilot scheme by Nottinghamshire Police began treating misogynistic acts as hate crimes. since enforcement began in 2016, there have been 167 reports of misogyny, including 68 that were treated as hate crimes and 99 which were considered hate incidents.

Hate incidents! What the hell are they? sending a flirty text? some romantic hopeful telling a girl she looks a lot like his next girlfriend? The reports have led to four arrests Four-letter rant: Mhairi Black and one criminal charge, although Notts Police are unable to confirm if the pilot has resulted in a single successful prosecution as the officer involved was not available.

Perhaps he (or she) was too busy trying to arrest men accused of giving women ‘funny looks’ on the bus.

The Force has submitted a report on the scheme to the National Police Chiefs’ Council and is awaiting feedback on whether it will be rolled out nationwide.

In the meantime, movements such as Time’s Up and #MeToo have proved that many men are beasts who’ll behave in a beastly fashion given half a chance.

In fact, more women reporting more incidents of harassment and more police officers taking them seriously is a very good thing, be it in Nottingham or in Hollywood.

It’s utterly unacceptable for men to think they can go around inappropriately touching women, leering at them or frightening them without expecting official reprimand and punishment.

But while such behaviour is boorish, sexist, bullying and sometimes even illegal, I feel uneasy about it being rebranded as a hate crime.

after all, what isn’t a hate crime these days?

raise a tiny voice of dissent, make a criticism about something or someone held dear by professional liberals, express a viewpoint that does not precisely coalesce with their fashionable, metropolitan Left-wing thinking and you will instantly be accused of being a criminal, a peddler of hate. recently, I was accused of a race hate crime for suggesting that Meghan Markle, as lovely as she is, could dial down her showbizzy tendencies, just a notch.

an Edinburgh law student who ridiculed ISIS was told he had committed a hate crime. a teacher who ‘misgendered’ a transgender child was accused of committing a hate crime. anyone raising concerns about mass immigration is immediately a racist, full of hate.

all this is a nonsense, diminishing the impact of real hate crimes.

Police define misogynistic hate crimes as ‘ incidents against women that are motivated by an attitude of a man towards a woman and includes behaviour targeted towards a woman by men simply because they are a woman’.

BUT how can we get evidence which will show, beyond reasonable doubt, that these crimes were motivated by misogyny?

It requires the law to be a mindreader, to see what is going on inside Merv the Perv’s tiny brain. Indeed, he could surely quite feasibly argue that he was motivated by love, not hatred, of women.

I believe that men are finally getting the message that women should be able to go about their daily lives without being bothered by sweaty creeps. But, above all, I believe in justice, not in telepathy.

These female MPs fighting to get another type of hate crime on the statute books may be wonderful public servants, but there is something wincing and rather self- aggrandising about them reading aloud the depths of their abuse in Parliament.

surely they ought to be taking Twitter and Facebook to task, instead of trying to criminalise the tragic behaviour of men sending vile texts from the bedroom of their mum’s house before having a fried egg for lunch in front of Countdown’s phwooaar, rachel riley.

The sad truth is that every woman in public life gets this kind of unwanted attention, be she fat, slim, gorgeous, plug-faced or me. and so do men.

Being online makes it all too easy for these basketcase deplorables to do their worst — and the only answer is to ignore them.