The morning after my second Covid vaccine, I was feeling rather groggy. Not ill or flu-y but yawny and lacklustre. Not up to doing much else, I spent longer than normal eating my toast and Marmite (Help! Marmite is in short supply and I only have half-a-jar left) catching up with my LinkedIn feed, and marvelling at how many hits my blog has had this month. (It was the ‘Bodies Piling High’ post wot did it).
I was reading the kinds of articles I don’t normally bother with, such as the best UK beaches according to Which? as reported by Daily Mail Online. Bamburgh (Northumberland) was top – I wonder if the vote was taken in summer, or winter when Siberian gales blast over the North Sea. Near the bottom of the list was Weston-super-Mare (Somerset). I was disappointed with that placing because I have a soft spot for Weston. We went there a couple of times as kids, and it’s where my grandmother died suddenly in 1943 aged just 37 so of course I never knew her, but it’s still sad.
Hubby and I spent a very enjoyable day there a couple of years ago, in bright sunshine, having coffee on the Grand Pier where Gran died, marvelling at how far the tide went out, cooing at the donkeys, then taking a circuitous route back to our B&B in Wells through the most glorious countryside.
I digress.
At the end of the Which? article was a plethora of inane comments by readers with nothing better to do than post inane comments at the end of inane articles. But one comment caught my eye. It read:
“Wait till those right wing, brexiteer, underclass couples with seven kids, several of whom are named after their parents, get their hands on these seaside resorts.”
Being a right-wing Brexiteer myself, whose extended family tends to name their kids after parents and grandparents, I took umbrage at that. And on behalf of hard-pressed, large families, I was seething.
But I calmed down when I reminded myself that such posts reflect badly on the writer, not the unwitting targets, and free speech has shown the perp in his true ghastly colours. Job done.
But then I wondered what would have happened had the comment
actually read:
The Daily Mail would have pulled it from its website, or blocked it in the first place, and/or the (would-be) posting investigated as a ‘non-crime hate incident’, earning the writer a police record, and/or the Daily Mail would become the next Charlie Hebdo.
The police must record non-crime incidents that are perceived to be motivated by hostility or prejudice about race, religion, disability, sexual preference or transgender issues. Therefore, unless Brexit is a religion, and being a member of the “underclass” is a disability, the above published insult would not excite the police pen-pushers, whereas the tweaked comment about Muslims is pretty likely to get the boys in blue red in the face.
The recording of non-crime hate incidents was a recommendation of the Macpherson inquiry into the 1993 racist murder of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence and which first coined the phrase “institutional racism”. As described above, this has led to two equally rude, insulting and hurtful comments, aimed at different sections of society, not being covered by the same guidelines, which is essentially, institutional discrimination.
Not come very far from 1993, have we.
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