Simple vandalism or race hate crime?

A European election candidate has been arrested in Winchester.

According to the Daily Mail, Paul Weston, chairman of Liberty GB, was arrested "for failing to comply with their request to move on under the powers of a dispersal order made against him".

He was also "detained on suspicion of racial harassment" after quoting a passage from Winston Churchill's 1899 book The River War.

I'm not going to get into the rights and wrongs of Weston's arrest. Dan Hannan has a go here (Britain has just witnessed a political arrest. Where is the liberal outrage?) and I don't entirely agree with him.

Truth is, it's a bit naive to turn up with a megaphone on the steps of the local guildhall and not expect to be moved on. To describe it as a "political arrest" is stretching things, irrespective of what may or may not have been said.

The reason I mention this story is because a friend recently drew my attention to something he had written in 2012 and I've been looking for a topical peg on which to hang it. (This isn't it but I shall press on. It's a slow news day.)

What he told me was this: two cars in his street had been damaged by someone scratching the words 'frog' and 'Nazi' on, respectively, a Renault and a BMW.

The assumption among neighbours was that drink had been involved and this was an example of petty vandalism. However the Community Support Officer decided it was a race hate crime and logged it as such.

Now, I've no idea what motivated the person to vandalise those cars (it can't have been envy because who would envy the owner of a Renault Espace!) but I wouldn't jump to the conclusion it was motivated by racial hatred.

Unfortunately that's what the police seem to do these days when a better description (in this instance) might have been 'drunken, moronic prank'.

See: Race hate or plain criminality (Gary Ling)

As for Paul Weston of Liberty GB, the best place for him is Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park. (Perhaps the authorities could allocate a similar space for him in Winchester.) If he gets arrested there we really do have a problem.

PS. I shouldn't have to say this but I will, in case anyone gets the wrong impression about my attitude to racial hatred, which I do not take lightly.

One of the few things I'm proud of having done is getting a fellow 'supporter' thrown out of a football ground for racially abusing an opposition player.

The player was Basile Boli, the opposition was Rangers, and it was a pre-season 'friendly'!