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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 was published in November 2024.
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SubscribeLet’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?
No I think not although she knew what she might trigger.
She’s guilty of appalling journalism and should have guts to admit it.
How is appalling journalism a police matter ?
The response is to not read her articles or tweets.
Again, where is the crime?
So the crime appears to be not apologising, is that right?
If you read carefully you’ll see I never said she committed a crime. What she did was racist, unfair on the Police and manipulative. If she had any guts she’d apologise. But was about her own celebrity wasn’t it as she knew a dog whistle would have the unthinking running to her defence
I know you never said she committed a crime, there was no crime, so the worst thing she did was fail to apologise. That’s not normally a crime but it seems to be the only thing she’s guilty of in your eyes.
No, he thinks she’s “racist” too.
You really are floundering, aren’t you?
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 dealt with by the existing 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 ?
Obviously a little difficult to have a discourse on the specific thing she did if you were not firstly inquisitive enough to find out. Basically she used a photo of Police smiling with a group of Asian men entirely unrelated to Pro -Palestinian demos to contend Police in cahoots with them. Why would you do that if you didn’t want to generate anger and if you didn’t have a problem with all Asian men?
She should just have said that was sloppy and v unfair on those in the photo and made her point about policing demos without the incendiary juxtaposition of an entirely unrelated photo.
More broadly I think there is such a thing as Hate speech where it’s inciting or encouraging violence. I suspect she knew exactly what she was doing- skirting close to potential Hate Speech to make herself a cause celeb. Pathetic
I suspect she knew exactly what she was doing
Your suspicions are irrelevant.
Not in his eyes. She was informed of her error and withdrew the tweet. That should have been the end of it. The Police are now looking how to exit this without looking dumb. That’s going to be hard.
She confused the Pakistan flag with the Palestinian flag. That the flag was held by men of Asian heritage was incidental (who else would raise Pakistan’s flag in Britain?).You have no reason to suspect she had a problem with all Asian men. It clearly wasn’t deliberate and the tweet was deleted in a timely manner. It was sloppy journalism but emphatically not a police matter. In fact if you read the message in the tweet, Pearson’s beef was with the police who were also in the photo and that’s why, in my opinion, they’re going for her.
She mistook the flag. Sloppy but not a demonstration of hate.
Did it show she had a problem with all Asian men. Scarcely. All she wished to demonstrate was that the police were too pally with what she inaccurately thought was a bunch of disruptive antisemites because she thought the flag was Palestinian.
Once she realised the true facts she took it down. While you are entitled to mock her for confusing the flags she was simply attempting to highlight what she perceived as two tier policing. A perfectly legitimate comment if she had not confused the flags.
No doubt she felt a bit of an idiot and had no wish to highlight her flag confusion; hence no grovelling apology to the police. It is not as if it was part of a considered article in the Telegraph.
As I understand it she removed the post when the error was pointed out to her.
Why don’t the Islamic r@pe gangs face sentence multipliers for what are the most egregious hate crimes this country has ever known?
Why,why,why?
Your interesting theory doesn’t explain why she took the post down almost immediately?. If she had intentionally posted something that was inaccurate then why would she remove it so quickly?
“non-crime hate incidents
Perfect. How do you defend yourself against non-crime crime?
Wait until we get to ‘non-crime, non-hate hate incidents’. Black is white. White is black.
Essex 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.
I not sure he does. He just isn’t very clever.
Come on.
If your career progression depends on being fully signed up woke idiot, why would you care about real crime?
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”.
It was personal in ‘The Godfather’, as the victim had just made a point of saying that it was his favourite horse. (It was also personal to the horse, but that’s another matter.)
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.
There is no need to reach for ‘Orwellian’ comparisons, unless of course one has in mind his Burmese Days.
Religiously diverse, multi-ethnic societies (such as Brtiain is becoming) have simply always required speech codes.
The British, of all nations, should know this considering we were the grat pioneers in legally drafting them.
The Indian Penal Code of 1860, drafted by Lord Macaualy no less, was rigid on its control of permitted speech in the maintenance of public order –
Section 153 A:
“Whoever by words, either spoken or written, or by signs or by visible representations or otherwise, promotes or attempts to promote, on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, residence, language, caste or community or any other ground whatsoever, disharmony or feelings of enmity, hatred or ill-will between different religious, racials, language or regional groups or castes or communities shall be punished with imprisonment which may extend to three years, or with fine, or with both.”
Liberalism, free speech and free assembly are the rare flowers of an ordered and ethnically homogenous society. Without controlled speech, diverse societies quickly descend into ethnic and religious violence. This is why the Indians, the Singaporeans and the Malaysians have carried over these British drafted ‘hate speech’ laws into their modern constitutions.
I don’t say this with any relish but one has to be candid about where we are going as a nation.
I can see that a multiethnic society might require laws to curb deliberate attempts to stir up enmity and hate at a level lower than mere calls for violence but that does not excuse the divisive creation of special categories that exclude large sections of the traditional population.
If you discriminate against a section of the population by saying that the expression of hate against them is legally acceptable you are not going to foster acceptance of any selective limitation on free speech. That should be perfectly obvious. Any curb on free speech should be entirely neutral as to those protected.
You are right, of course, in what you say.
It strikes me, however, that the detachment required for such ‘neutral’ approach to state-managed cohesion would require a painful recognition, not least by the English themselves, that they are now (or will very soon become) but one more minority ethnic group within a civic multi-ethnic polity, with no special claim for normative status. No birthright, no special place, no unique relation or claim to the term ‘British’.
This is already a reality in law, mind you, but it has not yet filtered down to the common consciousness among the indigenous population.
Once this truth has been assimilated they will be able to claim ‘protected’ status from the Universal State like any other client group.
Until the English underclass can get clear blue water between their own ‘class’ or ‘tribal’ interests and those of the rootless ‘legacy British’, white managerial elite with whom they are still arbitrarily confounded, they will continue to be an outcast, put upon and despised rump.
And they don’t have long to do it. Consider the fate of the Anglo Indian demographic when that polity came to an end. They had, as it were, outlived their usefulness and were almost abolished overnight.
That’s really interesting (and certainly something I’ve learnt today).
But equally interesting that at the time these laws were created in those particular colonies, I think no such laws existed back home in the UK. We could argue that they simply weren’t needed. But we had come from the opposite position where we actually had laws discriminating against people by religion (Catholic emancipation only arriving around 1830).
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it took an outside colonial power to actually create those laws.
And India’s certainly been moving away from non-discrimination over the last decade or so. As for Burma … . So while this may have stuck in Singapore and Malaysia, it’s not across the board.
Thank you for saying so, I will maintain to anyone who cares to hear it that the key to our future can be found in our past and therein lies the balm.
When looking at the history of free speech in Britain, It always depends where one draws the limits of the polity.
In England and Scotland where a large degree of confessional, ethnic, linguistic and cultural homogenity prevailed there was certainly great flourishing of Liberalism and Free Speech between 1800 and 1950.
Open any page of Punch Magazine from the time and you will see fearless mockery and robust interrogation of power such as we can only dream of in the era of actually-existing ‘Human Rights’.
In ‘John Bull’s Other Island’, however, where there remained real entrenched confessional and ethno-national differences among the population, a very different regime prevailed for the entirety of the century.
Ireland, a real constituent part of the nation called the United Kingdom, was subject to over 100 “Coercion Acts”, passed in the 120 odd years of the Union. These curtailed not just free speech and association but actually suspendid Habeas Corpus and Trial by Jury for most of the century and brought in detention without trial hot just for suspects in sedition cases but even for potential witnesses.
The Irish MP Arthur O’Connor remembered, in particular, the odious atmosphere created by one such bill, the Peace Preservation Act of 1870.
“It really was a Bill to suspend all law in Ireland. There would be no law in that country except the arbitrary will of the Lord Lieutenant. There would be no liberty of the person. Men and women at any time might be arrested on suspicion of having committed crime, or of having aroused the suspicion of the authorities at Dublin Castle and their spies. There would be no liberty of speech, for no speaker could tell what interpretation would be placed upon his words by some irresponsible person”
That last sentence, in particular, is for me very evocative and redolent of our own time. A time when neither the officers of the law, nor the general public seem to know what the limits of free speech actually are under the law.
In Ireland the government was indeed an authoritarian one. The implication is that free speech is currently abrogated because we have an authoritarian government suppressing the majority in favour of arbitrarily favoured minorities. In effect a colonial government that doesn’t rule by common consent but by suppressing the views of the indigenous population. It should not be surprising if the colonised start to resist.
Indeed, I believe that is precisely the conclusion to be drawn here.
Just out of interest, what was it that finally broke the back of the British Empire in India?
I find what you and William are discussing extremely interesting. It’s one of two very good observations I’ve noted in comments, the other one being that “woke” is a class phenomenon (I’m don’t recall whose comment that was).
It is interesting to observe how the British are involved in a modern, yet traditional in its actions, form of colonialism. If this is an accurate observation then we should be able to track the direction of the country and anticipate future events. I should add the same thing can be seen taking place in Australia. What’s also interesting is the speed with which this is taking place.
Are you saying that Britain has become such an unordered society that this is necessary? And how did that happen, pray tell.
The collapse of the British World System in 1947 and its replacement with American Consumer Materialism began a period of suicidal anomie at home even as it set off a great Völkerwanderung abroad. The Permissive society happened to coincide with the De Havilland Comet. Quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementa
And now this confusion hath wrought its masterpiece in our own day.
Ethnically diverse societies do NOT require some sort of speech codes/laws. Here in the US they can add hate speech to the accusations if you shot off your mouth while allegedly committing another crime. You can’t be charged with saying distasteful things online or across the dinner table. Threats (“menacing”) are a different matter.
Although, back in the days of landline phones, you could be charged just for cursing over the phone; probably a holdover from the days of live switchboard operators and party lines. Calling someone “a panty-waisted jazz dancer”, for instance, wouldn’t cut it.
I think the point is not that you have to have such laws – but that you have to have them if you want to maintain peace and stability. You can, of course, accept rioting, sectarian violence and terrorism as simply the price you pay.
It also depends on what you mean by ethnically diverse. Problems arise who you have people whose culture and sense of identity is different, and are exacerbated if those cultures clash in some way. People who are “racially” very different may get on, while others who are racially very similar may not. Hence the sectarianism in Northern Ireland and parts of Scotland.
I’m writing from Brooklyn, NY, where there are more immigrants than you can shake a stick at.
And Queens, the next county, is even more colorful. There is no “rioting, sectarian violence and terrorism…”.
Just a couple of years ago, while pedaling around the neighborhood park, I passed a bench full of moms with carriages sitting in the sun, chatting about their kids or their husbands or whatever. Half of them were Orthodox Muslims; the other half were Orthodox Jews. “Peace and stability” reigned.
It depends if you have eyes to see,I suppose.
It strikes many people, from abroad, that ethnic and sectarian violence has been rather a defining feature of American society since the creation of the Great Republic. Most obviously in the South but really intruding itself into every corner of that nation.
If we confine ourselves to only the New York area we could begin with the expropriation and effective extermination of the Lenape population of the region during the consolidation of the City and State of New York.
This was followed, without apparent irony, by the nascent ‘Nativist’ movement in the Empire State which fomented violent unrest against perceived incomers and non-white Protestants culminating in the famous Dead rabbits Riots of 1857
These were followed by such inter ethnic and sectarian violence as the anti-Catholic (Orange Riots, 60 dead), anti-Black (Draft Riots, 120 dead), Anti-Italian Mamroneck Riots and general anti-immigrant (Astor Place Riot, 31 dead).
These, of course, have been been reciprocated in the 20th Century by energetic anti-white and anti-authority (which often finds itself expressed as anti-white) riots up to and including aspects of the Harlem Riots and the recent Black Lives Matter riots. It has also pitted various immigrant groups against one another, Blacks against Jews in the Crown Heights Riots and Italians against blacks, over the border in the Newark Riots.
All this in a city which had a non white population of around 3% up to the 1940s and has a heavily armed police force and citizenry.
Your long view makes NYC seem like a seething cauldron of mass violence. That’s not the way it looks from here.
Note: it’s long been known that the great majority of murders are between friends and family for personal reasons. Not strangers, for racial/ethnic/religious reasons
I doubt it was your intention but you presented great argument for stopping immigration from shite countries.
I think that might actually have been his intention!
My intention, as far as I have one, is to point out that none of this is specifically modern, none of it is totalitarian (as Orwell used that word) and none of it is unprecedented. That is not the same as saying it is desirable.
As others have correctly interpreted, the English people, the common people, must be made to realise that they were, in some ways, the first and now the last ‘victims’ of Empire.
Sometimes I fancy that it all goes back to Edward III, the English Common Ancestor, who first distracted a dispossesed commons by dreams of foreign conquest.
Both Liberalism and Authoritarianism are sprung from the head of Brittania. Whig and Tory. Milton and Clarendon They are both traditions which must be owned and understood if the future is to correctly interpreted.
The plaintive tone and consoling counterfactuals of a people who cannot assimilate this reality are unworthy serious consideration.
That is one of two major flaws.
The other, of course, is that one cannot ever define ‘hate’ adequately. Hate is an intent, an emotion, an internal feeling.
If I say Caitlyn Jenner is really a man named Bruce, am I acting out of hatred? Am I stirred by negative emotion? Or do I merely see this as a statement of fact?
The problem you raise is compounded by the fact that a hate crime can be defined by the perception of a “victim” that what is said is motivated by hostility. Often it is the hostility of the “victim” to the speaker or writer that is really the issue. The statement that Caitlyn Jenner is a man likely involves no hatred of Caitlyn Jenner but involves some ill intentioned ideologue who “perceives” it as being motivated by hostility to Caitly. Jenner.who complains on his behalf.
Problem is surely that you challenge prevailing woke idiocy?
Situation in the West is similar to late Communism when certain subjects and ideas were forbidden but you no longer were killed or sent to Gulag unless you openly and publicly challenged the system.
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.
So working exactly as intended then.
Indeed, they work to defend one, approved view of the world and to erase other views. I can’t believe I’m living in what Britain has become – something akin to an Iron Curtain country.
Yes, I replied re this few times before.
West is akin to late Communism of the 80s.
People no longer killed or sent to gulag but loosing jobs etc….
Or even sent to prison for tweets.
Exactly.
Hate speech laws are there to criminalise dissent. Every fascist dictatorship in history has a version of them. They are in essence heresy/blasphemy/purity laws.
In modern British and European context, the laws are about protecting the leftist oppressor class from non-leftist revolution from below.
Quite apart from non crime ‘hate crime’ freedom of speech has been overturned by the existence and use of super injunctions. They are taken out in secret so nobody can even know of their existence unless they are hit in the face by one. Hence there are ‘super injunctions and rumours of super injunctions’. Fertile ground for conspiracies and distrust.
Pure Kafka. Did Parliament debate and create the legislation for super injunctions or are they just the manifestation of a lawyer’s private dream?
Beware of lawyers bearing ‘rights’. The Law giveth and the Law taketh away. Much’ takething’ away lately. And the giveth side consists mostly of ‘free’ stuff that obliges others to pay through tax or inflation.
Well said!
The principle of UK justice is that there is a presumption of innocence. Guilt has to be proved. And for serious matters decided by a Jury.
Non Crime Hate offends all these. There is no hearing. Therefore there is no defence. It damages the person who has no redress . There is no access to a court or a jury.
It is very bad law. And probably offends the Human Rights treaty.
Great points but all irrelevant.
All this legislation is aimed at native population unhappy with mass immigration of incompatible people.
Hate is an opinion. Opinions are not crimes. End of.
I would say hate is an emotion, usually involuntary. The opinion that an emotion is bad or harmful is often held by a second or third person, not the person having the emotion. Crimes should be actions that society has chosen to make a crime, not thoughts or emotions.
Exactly. Nor does a strong preference for something mean that you hate the opposing thing.
Citizens of the UK: Stand up and demand repeal of the law! That’s the only way to end this nonsense!
This is so freaking obvious it’s a black mark on the society that is blithely looking away as it is happening.
It is entirely wrong that any statute should effectively bind a judge in the basis of an accusers sentiment: it is extraordinary that any democratic parliament should pass such a statute, and it must be removed. It is equally abhorrent that immigrants who come from totalitarian countries, whose own laws not only discriminate, but execute those from ” other religions” should have laws passed in favour of and biased towards the protection of their ” beliefs and faith”. What is so chilling is that, thanks to these aforementioned laws, politicians, media and the public are effectively silenced from voicing these points. Britain has become the only National Socialist country in Europe since 1933, when that government was also democratically elected.
There are no police ” officers” they are badly trained, under educated, unqualified, unfit other ranks who not not last one day let alone one week of Infantry training at Catterick, let alone my old pre Sandhurst alma mater the old Guards Depot, Pirbright.
I rather think the problem is they’re over-educated, but in a narrow sense.
Two tier if ever more evidence was needed : how long were grooming gangs abusing children in Rotherham , Rochdale etc , how long did it take for police and CPS to try these men? 20 years was it? And they knock on doors for non crimes in 5 minutes?
The whole concept of hate crime is blatantly political not to mention absurd. Police forces have plenty of work to do rather than waste time on this nonsense. Britain is very good at staying below the radar where misbehaviour is concerned (other countries assume Britain is not misbehaving) so it is down to the people of Britain to demand a cleanup of the law in this area.
“Britain’s hate crime laws are eroding free speech”
That was always the unwritten intention
The whole concept of hate crimes, never mind hate speech should be summarily rejected. A crime is a crime is a crime. Crimes require legal intervention. Speech is free, no matter how repulsive, or it is not. It is there to be rejected by free speech, not punished by some legal restriction. This basic oxymoron, emphasis on moronic, needs to go.
Except when it comes to speaking up against genocide.
Non-crime hate incident? Could it be double speak? IDK but you all might want to ape your American cousins and enact a 1st amendment. Maybe they got something right?
The entire concept is political. It is a deliberate attack on free speech by an increasingly authoritarian state. NCHIs only make sense when seen as a political weapon by elites against people. They must be scrapped as must “hate crime” legislation. Very few crimes are “love crimes”!