In August 2020, the barrister Sarah Phillimore mused on Twitter: “my cat really loves Dreamies perhaps he’s a Methodist.” Me neither, but the point is what happened next. As an experiment, a fellow-Tweeter reported the gag to South Yorkshire Police, saying that it displayed anti-Methodist hatred: clearly Phillimore was stigmatising Methodists as “wandering pests that defecate in other people’s gardens”. The police knew just what to do. They decided that Phillimore had committed an NCHI: a “non-crime hate incident”.
