THE police have been "swooping" here in London. They have been raiding houses in the early hours and arresting perpetrators of so called "hate crimes".

It makes you wonder: aren't all crimes in a sense hate crimes? What would a "love crime" look like? "Excuse me darling, I've just nicked your gold watch. Give us a kiss!" No, but hate crimes are acts of evil selected for their politically-correct quotient: racism and wife-beating, for example. I can see how the police might identify a wife-beater, but how do you identify a racist in an age when we're all alleged to be "institutionally racist". According to the Macpherson Report, a racial incident is - and I am not making this up - "any incident so defined by the victim, or any other person". So, next time I ask you if you'd like a cup of tea, you can accuse me of being a racist for doing so - if you happen to be perverse enough that is.

The other week I had the honour of sitting at dinner next to Judge Neil Denison, the Common Serjeant and second most senior judge resident at the Old Bailey, and he gave me his opinion about the tide of political-correctness exemplified by the Macpherson Report. What he said to me on that occasion he later repeated in more detail in his retirement address. He said: "In its more lunatic aspects, political-correctness is merely ridiculous but, in the thinking behind it, there is something more sinister which is shown by the fact that already there are certain areas and topics where freedom of speech - in the sense of the right to open and frank discussion - is being gradually but significantly eroded".

It is true. There are now things you are not allowed to say, even in the privacy of your own home. There are tales of agents provocateur going to sit next to diners in restaurants and listening out for instances of racist or sexist conversation. This degree of intrusiveness is intolerable in an open society. My great fear is that it will eventually provoke a violent backlash. People will become angered by the many ways in which their lives are being circumscribed and their ordinary freedoms curtailed.

It's not even as if there is any logical consistency in political-correctness. What sort of lunacy is it, on the one hand to be so severe on paedophiles, while at the same time recommending the morning-after pill to 12-year-olds and lowering the age of homosexual consent to 16? And then there are the unfortunate consequences of the ban on handguns which came in after those schoolchildren were shot by a psychopath at Dunblane a few years ago. Now it is reported that, following the guns ban, gun crimes have actually increased by 30 per cent.

But what about other sorts of "hate crimes". For example, it's a real hate crime to want to deny children a decent education by abolishing the grammar schools. Foxhunting is hated out of class envy, as it was famously said: "Not for the pain it gives the fox, but for the pleasure it gives to the hunters." It's a hate crime when Lord Hattersley - plain Roy Hattersley as he then was - referred to those who live on council estates in Birmingham as "our people". The truth is that a member of parliament is elected to represent all the people in his constituency, whether they voted for him or not. What political-correctness and all these new restrictions on what may be said is leading to is class warfare. We should be warned: we've been here before, and it's extremely nasty. Remember, the Nazis started by banning free speech, then they burnt books, and then they went on to burn people.

* Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange

Published: Tuesday, March 27, 2001