If we are to ban states of mind, my vote would be for self-righteousness first, followed by sententiousness, with maybe imbecility as third choice. That would criminalise most of the people in the country I cannot abide, including all of the Lib Dems, Momentum and Justine Greening.

Sadly, the state of mind which the government wishes to ban is that rather more useful quality, hate. You are not allowed to hate anything any more, except for hate itself. But at least in hating hate you can really let yourself go, even if it is usually a wholly imaginary hate that you are hating. You can spew out your bile suffused with self–righteousness, sententiousness and imbecility. You can have yourself an anti-hate hate fest, safe in the knowledge that your hatred of hate is commendable. You can even join the organisation Stop Hate UK, which is trousering up plenty of funding for directing its hatred at hatred.

Stop Hate UK (SHU) doesn’t hate only hate, it also hates Brexit and people who argue that perhaps we’ve had too much immigration or are a little nonplussed when told that a muscular bloke with a beard in a dress is as authentically female as a real female. In other words, it hates a majority of the population.

You see, there is a lot of scope in hating hate: you are allowed a certain mission creep. If you weren’t, you would simply be a hippy. Anyway, SHU argues that it is ‘indisputable’ that hate crimes have increased enormously since and as a consequence of that hateful Brexit vote. Hatey people are going around beating up Poles and Pakistanis, or shouting out nasty things to them (‘whatever they call you, call us,’ demands SHU).

Our liberal establishment has swallowed this palpable rubbish whole, especially the police, who now consider hate crime a ‘priority’ rather than a chimera. The Metropolitan Police bragged of having 900 officers dedicated solely to battling evanescent hate crimes, especially people being beastly on the internet, rather than people stabbing each other or burgling your house.

The Met — and SHU — will show you the statistics, terrifying statistics, which suggest that hate crime is rising year on year, the whole country gripped by a hategeist largely because we voted to leave the European Union. And there will be columns in your morning newspapers from writers who have heard about someone who was subjected to a hate crime and didn’t like it and no longer feels welcome in the UK — and the BBC will wheel out its absurd ‘reality check’, correspondent Chris Morris, whose job it is to offer spurious statistical support for the BBC’s liberal prejudices, and he’ll confirm we whitey Leavers are all galvanised by hatred, sure enough.

The sole reason the figures have risen is the political drive to tell everyone to report hate crimes at every minute of every day, a fugue of entreaties and posters in every public building, yelling at you to report your hate crime, all put up by the Old Bill or local authorities or NGOs. In this, hate is a little like another fashionable, politicised crime — rape. The police were urged to make more prosecutions and told to believe unquestioningly the word of the accuser, thus dispensing with that tired old shibboleth, innocent until proven guilty. Meanwhile, women were enjoined to trot down to their local cop shop to spill whatever beans they had at their disposal. The result? A large rise in the number of reported rapes and a huge decrease in the proportion of successful prosecutions: the actual number of convictions stayed pretty much the same.

And now the Daily Mail has published the realities of some of these hate crimes, through a Freedom of Information request and, as you might imagine, they make very enjoyable reading.

I quite liked the person who complained that a bus driver had given them a ‘racist look’ and the complainant who insisted at a car crash that the other driver must have been racist because there was a remembrance poppy displayed on her car.

But my favourite, undoubtedly, was the dog. Someone complained that a dog that crapped outside their house had committed a racist act. As a hate-filled white Leaver, I have spent fruitless months trying to train my own dog, Jessie, to defecate only outside the homes of people from ethnic minority backgrounds in the hope that it will drive them from our country or at least make them feel uncomfortable, unwanted and bullied. But it’s a futile task. Jessie either does not understand the political imperative or does understand it and strongly disagrees.

Forced to choose, I would suggest the former. Jessie relieves herself when the urge to do so comes upon her when she is out. It might be outside the home of the poet Benjamin Zephaniah, whose witless doggerel has led the lefties’ demand that he is made poet laureate — but then again it might be in Nick Griffin’s front drive. Either way, I have my little black bag handy.

In another case, a white bloke was accused of smoking heavily in a racist manner — and there was more, much more, from within the 2,507 supposed hate crimes that the police have now made a priority. I’ve tried to smoke in a racist manner but I just can’t get the hang of it.

In truth, there is no such thing as a hate crime. You should not, and objectively cannot, police what exists inside people’s minds. As soon as you do, the law ceases to be objective. A crime is a crime and it is made neither worse nor better, materially, as a consequence of the motive. Intent matters, obviously, but that is different from trawling through someone’s mind to find out if they have an irrational dislike of the person who they have just stabbed in the neck. But hell, it’s just about biggest growth industry right now, so maybe we shouldn’t knock it.