I wrote yesterday about how Warwickshire Police wasted who knows how much money on what was in reality a ‘nothing-burger’ case. This force spent four months investigating the case of ‘White Lives Matter’ graffiti painted onto some grass in a park, only to drop the case for lack of an identifiable perpetrator.

Now another and equally wasteful, but even more chilling case, of the police wasting money on ‘hate crime’ and ‘hate speech’ guff has come to light.

Readers may recall that earlier this year the noted historian Dr David Starkey was attacked by the Left for his challenge, during an interview with the conservative and Brexiteer commentator Darren Grimes, to the Leftist claim that the Transatlantic Slave Trade (which incidentally the UK spent millions of pounds to suppress) was a genocide. He said that the fact that there were ‘so many damn Blacks’ in Africa was proof that the slave trade did not meet the classification of genocide.

On this he is more than likely correct, although many say he could have phrased the statement better. Contrary to the claims of leftist activists, the Black population of Africa and elsewhere has not shrunk as is the case with other groups that have been subjected to genocide. Europe’s Jewish population shrunk after the Nazi years and the Armenian population of Turkey shrunk after the Turkish genocide of the Armenians. These two events were both genuine genocides and we can see this from current population numbers and how they differ from how the projections of these populations would have been had genocide not occurred.

When the furore occurred, Mr Grimes earned himself a bit of notoriety and criticism from members of the public as he appeared to throw Dr Starkey under the proverbial bus, by making cringe-worthy apologies for Dr Starkey’s words. The criticism was to some extent justified as one should never ever apologise to the censorious mob. However, Darren Grimes is quite young, I believe that he’s in his late twenties and has only been involved in politics, initially with the Liberal Democrats, for five years, so I’ll cut him a little slack, as I made political judgement call screw ups at that age and younger.

However now the Leftist dominated British state is now going after Darren Grimes. Despite my above criticisms of Mr Grimes behaviour in apologising when he should not have, I have to declare my support for him in his current travails.

This is because according to the Reclaim the Net internet free speech group and numerous other news outlets, Mr Grimes is now under investigation by the Metropolitan Police (presumably their ‘hate crime’ unit) for the interview with Dr Starkey and is being accused of ‘stirring up racial hatred’ by publishing the interview.

Reclaim The Net said:

The British political commentator, Darren Grimes, is now being investigated by the police after a controversial podcast interview with the historian David Starkey.

Starkey’s comments attracted intense backlash and contempt as soon as the video was released. The historian, in the interview, said that slavery was not similar to genocide because there are “so many damn blacks.”

However, Grimes was only interviewing Starkey when Starkey made the extremely controversial comment – and yet it’s Grimes that’s now being investigated by London’s Metropolitan Police, not Starkey.

Grimes, disgruntled that the police are investigating him over comments made by the host, said that the whole affair is an “abuse of taxpayer’s money.”

I completely agree with Mr Grimes on this. This whole affair is an abuse of taxpayer’s money. It’s also an attack on what little freedom of speech we have left in the UK as this now potentially criminalises political interviewers not for what they themselves say, but for what their interviewees say. As for the money wasted, I wonder how many of the daily stabbings that occur on the streets of London could have been prevented or investigated more thoroughly with the money that the Met is wasting on this case?

Reclaim the Net continued:

Grimes is currently being accused of “stirring up racial hatred” as he published the interview featuring Starkey on his podcast.

The conservative political commentator released a statement saying that the police were more focused on investigating “vexatious” claims with taxpayers’ money. “At a time when many in our country are facing uncertainty and financial hardship, I cannot imagine a more contemptible way for the Metropolitan Police to abuse taxpayers’ money and the trust of citizens then by investigating this vexatious claim.”

He also said that the whole ordeal and the possibility of his arrest due to the allegations against him can stifle free speech and expression. Luke Gittos, his lawyer, also spoke along the same lines and said that the investigation is an “unprecedented use of Public Order legislation.”

The Free Speech Union has come to Grimes’s support and called out the accusation against him to be “absurd.”

“The only hatred Dr Starkey stirred up was against himself. Mr Grimes himself publicly apologised for having broadcast Dr Starkey’s remarks, saying that he ‘should have robustly questioned Dr Starkey about his comments,'” said Toby Young, the General Secretary of Free Speech Union.

It is indeed an ‘absurd’ case but probably no less absurd than the thousands of other ‘hate speech’ cases that are brought in the United Kingdom each year. Spiked’s Brendan O’Neil wrote in Reason Magazine in 2018 that in 2016 In 2016, “3,300 people were detained and questioned for things they said online. In some parts of Britain the arrest rate for offensive speech has risen by nearly 900% in recent years. We Brits are sleepwalking into a police state.” If what we have seen in the intervening years between 2016 and 2020, we are no longer sleepwalking towards a police state, we are already there.

There is much that I’d like to know, that I currently don’t know about the Darren Grimes case. I’d especially like to know where the initial complaint came from? Did it come from some particularly snowflakey individual who felt ‘threatened’ by Dr Starkey’s comments and realising that they were not going to get Dr Starkey himself, because of the public support that he got, instead put in a vexatious complaint about Mr Grimes?

That of course is one possibility but there is another. That other possibility is that this complaint was put in by one of the great many identity politics activist groups that now exist and have traction and influence over Britain’s police forces. These groups are too often funded with great hunks of public money and equally too often are involved in campaigns to censor what they believe are ‘wrong speakers’.

This second possibility is not unlikely. It’s quite possible that an individual bringing this specious and valueless complaint to the Met Police would have had it logged as a ‘non crime hate incident’ (a truly Orwellian term if ever there was one) as there doesn’t seem to be any grounds to harass Mr Grimes over something somebody else said. On the other hand if the complaint was brought to the Met Police by some ‘third party hate crime reporting group’ or some identity politics group with strong contacts with police management and the political class, then they are far more likely to take the complaint seriously and do the political bidding of the said identity politics group and harass Mr Grimes.

I think that Mr Grimes is in for a long fight. The usual practise of the British police when it comes to cases like this is to make the process of prosecution itself a part of the punishment. I suspect that unless sensible voices such as those of the Free Speech Union prevail, this case will be dragged out by the police over the course of a year. Maybe even longer? This is because the organs of the British state (about which Sargon has an excellent but worrying video on the subject) have been heavily penetrated by left wing identity politics groups and this has been most noticeable in the police, who now kow tow to these groups and do their bidding. Police forces are now terrified of the criticism they will get from the identity politics groups and from the Let should they allow a wrong speaker to continue to speak without sanction, therefore they make political arrests and undertake political investigations of a sort that are amply demonstrated by the way that they are harassing Mr Darren Grimes.