Telegraph View: The law has established a climate within which pettiness flourishes to the detriment of any common sense.
A councillor faces suspension for dismissing Scientology as “stupid”; another is convicted of racial harassment for calling a colleague a coconut; a householder is made to feel like a racist for objecting to a gipsy site near his home. Every day, it seems, brings another tale of how comments that a few years ago would have been regarded as nothing worse than rudeness – or simply a difference of opinion – have either been criminalised or considered a justification for disciplinary action.