The REAL hate mob: arrogant tiny minority who want to impose THEIR views on us all

W Ho knew that Christmas wrapping paper could be so contentious? That taking advantage of a free Paperchase offer in Saturday’s Mail (worth £4.75, while stocks last) would see the readers of this newspaper accused of ‘hate’ crime. And there were you thinking you were just saving a few quid before Christmas.

But that doesn’t take into account the twisted thinking of a self-appointed watchdog called ‘Stop Funding Hate’, a tiny motley bunch of Left-wing Twitter warriors — rabid Corbynistas and Remainers — who spotted an opportunity to promote their agenda of extreme snowflakery after the first editions rolled off the presses in the early hours of Saturday morning.

They sent their first Tweet denouncing Paperchase for its collaboration with the Daily Mail at around 12.40am, quickly followed by a second, citing my column from last week on transgender rights.

My argument was that Britain is just about the most tolerant country on earth — leading the way on issues such as gay marriage — and that ‘it’s time for the LGBT community to relax a little and enjoy some of their freedoms’.

I added that the vast majority already did — but there was ‘a small minority of dissatisfied dissenters for whom a broadly benign atmosphere of tolerance will never be enough’ — and these people risked undermining their cause by ‘pushing their agenda to extremes’. T HIS was mendaciously held up as an example of how the Mail ‘targets trans people’, and followed by a third Tweet — at 1.23am, do these people ever sleep? — attacking my column from Wednesday, November 1, in which I argued that the Westminster witch hunt against sex-pest male MPs was getting out of control.

Given the subsequent suicide of a Labour politician, that might not have been an entirely unreasonable view. Still, Stop Funding Hate got a little bit of traction. By Sunday morning they’d received several hundred internet messages, and the Paperchase management felt sufficiently under pressure to issue a statement promising to take all feedback into consideration.

on Monday, they apologised unreservedly, stating: ‘We’ve listened to you about this weekend’s newspaper promotion. We now know we were wrong to do this — we’re truly sorry and we won’t ever do it again. Thanks for telling us what you really think and we apologise if we have let you down on this one. Lesson learnt.’

I must confess the tone of this apology left me wondering whether it had been drafted by an innumerate 16-year-old work experience person, who couldn’t tell the difference between a few hundred Tweets (which probably weren’t even from Paperchase customers) and the four million people who read the Mail. S TILL, I’ve had some experience of corporate commercial environments, and I know how panicked they get when this sort of thing happens and this appeasement is their default position.

So I don’t really blame Paperchase for caving in. Nor am I going to waste time defending my own writing — regular readers will know where I stand on these matters, and if not you can judge for yourself by reading the articles in full on the Mail website (which is more, I suspect, than those who misrepresent them have actually done).

Paperchase’s cowardice or the rights and wrongs of my Wednesday warblings are not the real point here. What this is really about is an attack on one the most precious rights of all, one which in today’s social-media hate mob-dominated society finds itself increasingly under threat: free speech.

The importance of this cannot be understated. Without the right to free speech there can be no honest political or ideological debate, and without that we have no democracy.

Thought-shaming of the kind Stop Funding Hate practises swiftly leads to censorship which, throughout history, has never ended in anything but human suffering. That is real hate. To seek to censor and cast as morally deplorable anyone who dares to question a certain narrow stance on immigration, membership of the EU, the right of three-year-olds to self-determine their own gender — or any other of the thorny issues that society today must wrestle with. That Stop Funding Hate’s weapon of choice should be Twitter, a platform that has elevated mob rule and online bullying to a virtual art, is an irony that seems lost on the organisation and its supporters.

But then self-knowledge does not generally seem to be their forte. They are far too busy virtue-signalling and bossing ordinary people around.

The term liberal fascism is overused, but never has there been a more obvious case for it than here: a small group of selfappointed moral arbiters, with no obvious qualifications for the job save a staunchly pro-Remain, Corbynista stance, who choose to target content they don’t like by sending bullying tweets to advertisers and promotional partners such as Paperchase with the aim of stifling freedom of expression.

At the heart of their agenda is the notion that everything the Mail says or does is born out of prejudice. In fact, the opposite is true. For years before I was hired to write for it, I admired the Mail as a paper of great courage but also compassion. A paper with a determination to speak truth to power, however hard and unpopular that truth may be.

It is a newspaper that has fought injustice by helping convict the killers of Stephen Lawrence; that has exposed corporate greed and skewered politicians without fear or favour. That, because of its vast and loyal readership, has in recent years been able to lead the way on environmental issues, winning bans on plastic bags and microbeads.

A paper that has highlighted the plight of inmates in Guantanamo Bay and donated generously to innumerable good causes, including matching the donations of readers following the Grenfell Tower tragedy and setting up annual awards for the unsung heroes of the NHS.

When Paperchase took that seemingly innocuous decision to give the good readers of this newspaper a few sheets of free wrapping paper, it was not ‘funding hate’.

It was doing the exact opposite: supporting the cause of free speech in this country and, for one fleeting moment, being a part of a great newspaper that has at its core a fierce, fearless — and deeply caring — heart.