In response to Jane Kelly: Sticks and stones? It’s speaking freely that will hurt you the most, Owen_Morgan wrote:

The British Army grasped the truth about criminalising emotions more than a century ago. At the start of the Great War, about a dozen men were sent to face firing squads on the charge of cowardice. Soon, however, the Army realised that a court martial, or, by implication, any other kind of court, was not competent to establish a state of mind.

Contrary to the mythology, the British Army executed few men for their emotional state before recognising that that was wrong. Eighty years later, Harriet Harman re-criminalised emotions.

And the Hate Crime industry just gets ever more out of control. Progress.