Lord Vinson, The Freedom Association's Patron, recently asked the Government in a written Parliamentary Question "what plans they have, if any, to review the definition used by the Crown Prosecution Service and the National Police Chiefs’ Council to identify religiously motivated incidents or crimes, in particular regard to the relevance of section 29J of the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006".

Here is the answer given by Baroness Williams of Trafford, a Home Office Minister:

London is in the grip of a knife crime epidemic, yet despite this, Cressida Dick, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, found the time in her busy schedule to ponder Boris Johnson's Telegraph article about Muslim women wearing the burqa.

She must have thought long and hard about it, too. She weighed up the pros and cons. She may have had a couple of sleepless nights and suffered nightmares about it, but she then decided, without a complaint being made to the police, that she would ask the Met's hate crime team to investigate. Has Boris committed a criminal offence? No-one else was thinking that apart from her, but what the hell, if they discover a crime and then charge someone for it, it makes the crime figures look better.