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November 18, 2024 - 7:00am
Hate crime is back in the news. The legislation has worried supporters of free speech for some time, but until last week few people were aware of the risk it poses to journalists — and female journalists in particular. The revelation that two well-known women, the Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson and the author Julie Bindel, have both received visits at home from police officers has caused outrage.
Yesterday, Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp joined in a chorus of criticism, suggesting that officers are misusing the law “probably 90%” of the time. His intervention highlights the problem at the heart of hate crime legislation, which arrived on the statute books even though no one has ever been able to define it. Police forces have tried to get round this absence of clarity by inventing an Orwellian-sounding category of “non-crime hate incidents”, which don’t meet the threshold of criminality.
You might think the clue is in the name: if something isn’t a crime, why are the police bothering with it at all? What it means, if we strip away the jargon, is: “we don’t think you’ve committed a crime but we believe you might, so we’re putting a mark against your name.” They don’t even have to tell you they’re doing it, although a knock on the door rather gives the game away. Philp believes NCHIs should be used “extremely rarely”, when there is a “real risk of imminent criminality”. But they’re not — 13,200 were recorded in the 12 months to June 2024 — and Labour wants to reverse guidance issued last year to ensure forces log NCHIs only if there is a serious risk of harm.
Essex Police disputes Pearson’s account, claiming its officers were investigating “an incident or offence of potentially inciting racial hatred online” rather than an NCHI, but that merely confirms the shameful lack of precision involved in such visits. Either way, the force appears to have been somewhat slow off the mark, responding to an unspecified social media post Pearson made a whole year earlier. In 2019, Bindel was told one of her posts on Twitter was being investigated as a “hate crime” following a complaint “from a transgender man in the Netherlands”. Refused any further information, she sensibly declined to attend a voluntary interview and the matter was dropped.
But these events confirm what supporters of free speech have always known, which is that laws against “hate crime” are an invitation to the disturbed, malicious and easily offended. Trans activists love them, claiming to be victims of “hate” when someone disagrees with them or posts something that hurts their feelings. Curiously, it doesn’t work in the other direction: we’ve all seen police officers look the other way when feminists are confronted with placards calling for murder or sexual violence.
Not that I’m calling for greater use of “hate crime” law. The entire concept is flawed, diverting police resources to deal with matters that aren’t — or shouldn’t be — criminal offences. In England and Wales, 3,000 incidents of violence against women are recorded by the police every day. When they come knocking on someone’s door, it should be in pursuit of unconvicted rapists and domestic abusers, not women who’ve expressed an opinion.
Joan Smith is a novelist and columnist. She was previously Chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board. Her book Unfortunately, She Was A Nymphomaniac: A New History of Rome’s Imperial Women will be published in November 2024.
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SubscribeEssex Police have a clearup rate of around 10% for most categories of real world crime. Even if we ignore the question of principle about fundamental liberties (we shouldn’t, but tackling this is a matter for parliament and the courts) they surely have operational discretion to focus limited resources on this not on thought crimes.
Starmer aims to create a police state on the Chinese model.
The whole concept of treating “hate” against particular favoured classes is entirely unegalitarian. It proclaims we are not all equal before the law. All are equal but some are more equal than others as Orwell’s satire Animal Farm put it. A disgraceful and retrograde concept.
“non-crime hate incidents
Perfect. How do you defend yourself against non-crime crime?
So working exactly as intended then.
Presumably placing a severed horses head in someone’s bed by the Mafia can’t be categorised as a hate crime as it is “only business not personal”.
The fact that the State collects information about you secretly is not new in the UK. My father was invited to a private dinner at which Selwyn Lloyd was to be present many years ago only to be told by his host that my father was on a black list as a suspected Communist. This was somewhat startling since he was a man of impeccable conservative principles but it emerged that he had once attended a meeting of “doctors against war” as he was a doctor who didn’t favour war only to lose interest when it became apparent that it was a communist front organisation.
It is not unreasonable for the state to collect information that might identify potential criminal actors but as with anything to do with State organisations it has to be recognised that the information is likely to be ludicrously inaccurate.
Harassing people for expressed views that fall short of explicitly calling for criminal acts to be committed is in another category of sinister Stasi like behaviour. Alison Pearson simply retweeted inaccurate information that she took down as soon as it became clear it was inaccurate. She did not call for violence. Similarly Julie Bindel called for no pogrom against the transgender.
The whole “hate speech” legislation should be rescinded without further delay but will not be while the authoritarian left are in government. It should, of course, have been rescinded by the Conservatives but unfortunately the Tory Party was riddled with authoritarian leftists. Badenoch will not gain traction until she commits to rescinding these hate laws.
Let’s be clear – Pearson sought to create rage by falsely using an incorrect photo nothing to do with pro-Palestinian demos. Whether it’s a hate crime or not she’s failed to apologise for her error. Instead she and others look to distract and obfuscate. Gutless.
So she’s committed no crime?
So the crime appears to be not apologising, is that right?
I can’t see she’s done anything worse than what you do on here everyday.
What exactly is “rage” and why would that be a problem ? Isn’t this a normal human emotion that we’ve lived with for thousands of years ?
How does what Alison Pearson did (I haven’t seen it, but assume your must have to comment) differ from free speech ?
How is Alison Pearson responsible for how other people interpret, misinterpret or distort things that she says ?
My view – there’s no so thing as “hate crime”. And no problem that wasn’t already adequately dealth with by the laws before this hate crime nonsense was dreamt up.
Meanwhile, we’ll be lectured about how the police and public services are “short of resources”.
Over 50% of management is about focusing on the biggest challenges and prioritising resources. Is it any wonder that the UK’s productivity is so poor when we waste so much time and effort on non-problems ?
Why don’t the Islamic r@pe gangs face sentence multipliers for what are the most egregious hate crimes this country has ever known?