PETER HITCHENS: Don't like the PC mob? Well now that makes YOU a terror threat 

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Theresa May’s Home Office is making a law which attacks free expression in this country as it has never been attacked before

We are on the verge of founding Britain’s first Thought Police. 

Using the excuse of terrorism – whose main victim is considered thought – Theresa May’s Home Office is making a law which attacks free expression in this country as it has never been attacked before.

We already have some dangerous laws on the books. The Civil Contingencies Act can be used to turn Britain into a dictatorship overnight, if politicians can find an excuse to activate it.

But the Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill, now slipping quietly and quickly through Parliament, is in a way even worse. It tells us what opinions we should have, or should not have.

As ever, terrorism is the pretext. Yet there is no evidence to suggest that the criminal drifters, school drop-outs and drug-addled losers who do much terrorist dirty work (and whose connections with vast worldwide conspiracies are sketchy to say the least) will be even slightly affected by it.

In a consultation paper attached to the Bill, all kinds of institutions, from nursery schools (yes really, see paragraph 107) to universities, are warned that they must be on the lookout for ‘extremists’.

But universities are told they have a ‘responsibility to exclude those promoting extremist views that support or are conducive to terrorism’.

Those words ‘conducive to’ are so vague that they could include almost anybody with views outside the mainstream.

What follows might have come from the laws of the Chinese People’s Republic or Mr Putin’s Russia. Two weeks’ advance notice of meetings must be given so that speakers can be checked up on, and the meeting cancelled if necessary.

Warning must also be given of the topic, ‘sight of any presentations, footage to be broadcast, etc’. A ‘risk assessment’ must be made on whether the meeting should be cancelled altogether, compelled to include an opposing speaker or (even more creepy) ‘someone in the audience to monitor the event’.

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Institutions will be obliged to promote ‘British values’. These are defined as ‘democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance for those with different faiths and beliefs’. ‘Vocal and active opposition’ to any of these is now officially described as ‘extremism’.

Given authority’s general scorn for conservative Christianity, and its quivering, obsequious fear of Islam, it is easy to see how the second half will be applied in practice. As for ‘democracy’, plenty of people (me included) are not at all sure we have it, and wouldn’t be that keen on it if we did.

Am I then an ‘extremist’ who should be kept from speaking at colleges? Quite possibly. But the same paragraph (89, as it happens) goes further. ‘We expect institutions to encourage students to respect other people with particular regard to the protected characteristics set out in the Equality Act 2010’. 

These ‘protected characteristics’, about which we must be careful not to be ‘extremist’, are in fact the pillars of political correctness – including disability, gender reassignment, pregnancy and maternity, race, sex and sexual orientation.

The Bill is terrible in many other ways. And there is no reason to believe that any of these measures would have prevented any of the terrorist murders here or abroad, or will do so in future.

They have been lifted out of the box marked ‘try this on the Home Secretary during a national panic’, by officials who long to turn our free society into a despotism.

Once, there would have been enough wise, educated, grown-up people in both Houses of Parliament to stand up against this sort of spasm. Now most legislators go weak at the knees like simpering teenage groupies whenever anyone from the ‘Security’ or ‘Intelligence’ services demands more power and more money.

So far there has been nothing but a tiny mouse-squeak of protest against this dangerous, anti-British, concrete-headed twaddle. It will go through. And in ten years’ time we’ll wonder why we’re locking people up for thinking. We’ll ask: ‘How did that happen?’ This is how it happens.

Finally a film that's got it right

For once, a film about real events that comes close to getting it right.

The Theory Of Everything, a fictionalised but broadly true account of the marriage of Professor Stephen Hawking and his first wife Jane, is intelligent and profound, irresistibly moving and surprisingly funny in places.

The recent past is subtly recreated. The plot pivots on the extraordinary fact that Mrs Hawking – an academic in her own right – maintained a Christian belief despite her husband’s active atheism.

The Theory Of Everything starring Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones (above) is intelligent and profound, irresistibly moving and surprisingly funny in places

Their marriage, her selfless love despite his illness, the marriage’s eventual breakdown, the dreadful contrast between Hawking’s soaring mind and his collapsing, failing body, must constantly have challenged the deepest beliefs of both of them.

Eddie Redmayne is, of course, superb as he inhabits the professor’s life and becomes him.

But Felicity Jones is even better, and, rather surprisingly, manages to portray Jane as an even more remarkable human being than her husband.

British values... it's a baffling topic these days

You'd never guess just how few homosexuals there were from the way we go on about it. In a spot check to make sure their Christian school was teaching ‘British values’, baffled tots in Sunderland were asked by government inspectors about ‘what lesbians do’.

Almost immediately after this revelation, plans were announced in Manchester for an entire school devoted to homosexual, bisexual and transgender children.

I’m not actually against such a school, if enough people want it. Let a hundred flowers bloom, as far as I’m concerned. Let’s have atheist schools, too, and see how they work out.

But if we can select pupils on the grounds of their sexual orientation, why is it illegal to select on the grounds of ability? Something wrong here, surely?

As for the lesbian question, I was 12 before I even knew what a call-girl was, let alone a lesbian, and look how I turned out – not to mention my grasp of ‘British values’.

Lethal cost of the great crime lie

Somehow the Government has so far kept the lid on the fact that despite fiddled figures claiming that crime is dropping, our prisons are full, and exploding with violence, gang rivalry and drugs. 

Prison officers, the main civilising influence in these dreadful liberal institutions, are in growing danger of severe violence. 

Ten are attacked every day. On Radio 4’s File On 4 on Tuesday, Peter McParlin, the chairman of the Prison Officers’ Association, said: ‘I wake up every morning thinking, “Today is the day one of my colleagues will be murdered in their work.” ’

This crisis is the result of 50 years of Left-wing failure, which has ensured that wrongdoers don’t encounter serious punishment until they are already hardened criminals.