March 1, 2025 - 1:00pm
“Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman.” Such was the suggestion of historian A.J.P. Taylor, at the beginning of his English History 1914-45. Whether you find such a vision attractive or not depends on your wider political views. Taylor himself could hardly have intended it as a straightforward hymn of praise to light-touch government, given his lifelong socialist views.
Regardless, that conception of the role of government was dead and buried long ago. It is, though, the vital context for understanding the news that the Labour government is apparently working to ensure that non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs) continue to be recorded, albeit under a different name. NCHIs were strongly criticised by the Court of Appeal in a 2021 ruling as having a potential “chilling effect” on free speech. They have been the target of much criticism and negative campaigning. Getting rid of them entirely would be straightforward, an easy win for Labour, and yet the party refuses to do so, despite the Prime Minister’s promise last year of “a politics that treads a little lighter on all of our lives”.
For Labour, there is no real contradiction here; it would argue that in a highly diverse society, controlling “hate speech” or “misinformation” is part of keeping the peace, and so protects citizens in a more indirect way. This is why many Left-wing people struggle to understand objections to diversity training, or to the VAT raid on private schools: equality is crucial to a healthy society, so any sacrifices are worth it. It explains the seemingly vindictive sentencing of people who made unwise comments on social media during last summer’s riots. The extraordinary recent criticism of Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch by the Lady Chief Justice for daring to debate judicial rulings also reflects the modern state’s wariness of robustly expressed opinion.
Of course, the ultimate logic of this way of thinking is endless interference in people’s personal interactions and political opinions, because unjust social relations – or at least what modern progressives regard as unjust social relations — are the near-inevitable outcome of a genuinely free society. Once upon a time, civil liberties campaigners trained their focus on the state’s restrictions on the individual, which were relatively simple to remove. Now those battles are won, and attention has turned to supposed injustices arising from the attitudes and beliefs of private citizens and private institutions — sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. Given their vague and almost infinitely elastic definitions, abolishing these supposed injustices requires the state to tread very heavily indeed on all our lives.
This is the paradox of a permissive and multicultural society: how do you manage the people who don’t want to be permissive and multicultural? How do you restrain the power of the state when your own ideology legitimises, in principle, almost endless interference in the day-to-day interactions of ordinary people? Non-crime hate incidents are the logical conclusion of this ideology; it continued unchecked under successive Conservative governments, and it’s going nowhere under this one.
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SubscribeOh, that’s so very simple, dear author – and dear political establishment.
The principle of “harm” has been extended to the written or spoken word. Just do away with that, the progressive ‘victim mentality’ and unless someone is being directly threatened with physical harm by the individual writing or speaking – which was already punishable in law, and rightly so – leave well alone. Public opprobrium is sufficient, if warranted.
Would you also remove defamation laws?
Defamation concerns claims made against an individual which have to be demonstrated to be untrue before being found guilty.
I think it must be shown that the speaker/writer knew or must have known that the defaming comment was false. State-side.
I think in the UK defamation applies whether you knew it to be false or not. You have a duty not to be untruthful when slagging someone off
If you are defamed you can sue and claims your damages
People misunderstand the basis of damages in libel and slander cases. They often seem to assume if someone is nasty, then the scale of damages ramps up. But it is related to actual financial damage someone can convincingly argue they have, and could continue to, suffer because of what was said.
Causing Hurty feelings have crept in a bit, but not so much as people imagine.
It’s why people can win Libel cases but get very small awards and no legal costs, the judge deciding the whole thing was a nonsense that should never have got court and half that fault was the plaintiff’s.
Never mind though, one way or another the struggling lawyers do get paid in the end by someone.
Absolutely right!
Too true. Leave crime to the police and leave police out of social matters.
You certainly don’t now hear the chant we were taught as young ‘uns, which in hindsight held a lot of wisdom: ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me’.
That works in the playground, but things get more complicated when you’re grown up.
Not sure what point you’re making. The playground can be a pretty complicated, also cruel, place. And the main point, to develop some toughness, applies equally to adults.
You appear to be somewhat hostile to the author. I don’t think he is in support of how things are developing, rather the contrary.
“Once upon a time, civil liberties campaigners trained their focus on the state’s restrictions on the individual, which were relatively simple to remove. Now those battles are won…”
Are you kidding me? Have you forgotten COVID?
The Left
They go out of their way to create an incoherent and multi-ethnic society, with competing factions vying for territory & influence.
Then when they have succeededin creating this ‘Utopia’ they need to clamp down on free speech in order to manage it and keep the peace.
Like having a perfectly good leg amputated, so you can have a wooden one.
Then insist every gets regular woodworm treatment.
Unfortunately this does seem to be a feature of multiethnic societies – as imperial experience shows. A key job of government becomes the job of managing conflict between the different ethnic groups. And this repression can go well beyond clamping down on free speech.
It’s not just about policing a multi ethnic society though. The state seems equally keen on clamping down on speech it considers to be sexist, misogynist and arguably just anti feminist. I’m not sure this repressive turn is solely a response to a multi ethnic society – the censorious turn was in full heat on campuses while multiculturalism in Britain was in its infancy.
I don’t even think it’s possible to have a ‘law and liberty’ type democratic state which is also highly diverse. It’s no coincidence that modern-style democracies came about in homogenous, high-trust European societies. We in the West hubristically lost sight of the fact that peaceful and free societies are the global and historical exception, not the norm. I’m not sure if the Progressive (itself a type of late-stage sour liberalism) destruction of this type of self-governing demos primarily has a utopian-narcissistic impetus (‘destroy the good in pursuit of the perfect’) or a more cynical perhaps Nietschean one (‘I’m unhappy with my lot so will tear it all down, in the new world I will be a god-ruler’) or is a more complex thing, perhaps just a wearing out of an old civilisation.
Actually Europe was a hotbed of conflict before the peace of Westphalia (and of course afterwards too though more between nations than within). We’ve had our massacres, our civil wars and our genocides. My fear is that we are creating the conditions for repeating the whole bloody mess again.
Yes I know, your comment doesn’t really seem to address my post though it’s a response to it. My point is that relatively homogenous nation-states were able to create high-trust societies, pre-conditions for democracy. And I think we are destroying this.
The Left in Britain largely represents a suburban graduate class which profits from the mass immigration and the degradation of poorer communities. London property owners in the wealthier suburbs, for example, have acquired at least another £trillion just since the pandemic and this upward transfer shows no signs of slowing down. It’s easy to be super tolerant and multi-culti when you’re on the receiving end of all that bunce.
Eventually the catastrophe unfolding in the cities will spill over into these areas and start to affect them in negative ways, at which point they’ll start screaming for a British Trump.
Because the Left likes it that way. If people are afraid to speak then its narrative prevails. The Left wins the argument by muzzling the opposing view point. Unherd plays its part.
This is the Unherd writer who smeared Tommy Robinson as ‘winking in the face of violence’.
Unherd do what your name pretends to do.
Find some writers from the Right.
We all live in the Panopticon now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon
But who watches the watchers?
Unherd, a tool of the Left, employs prostitute-writers like Gooch to smear Tommy Robinson a journalist who questions the Left’s narrative, and then asks why doesn’t Starmer stop doing the same?
What a farce this is.
Holy Cow you don’t half see everything in black and white. Don’t you have space for a bit of sympathy for human fallibility, including for yourself? Eg Unherd might sometimes print views to the Left of yours, doesn’t make it ‘a tool of the left’; Gooch might or might not smear someone, doesn’t make him a cynical prostitute-writer; people (including you) get stuff wrong, doesn’t mean it’s all a farce. This condemnation is a totalitarian impulse.
Tommy Robinson is a pariah to all UK media including Unherd. Gooch is one of the Unherd tribe who smear him.
Starmer has done the very same thing. Robinson “is in prison for trying to scupper a trial” he said in the House of Commons. This is a lie.
And you accuse me of having a totalitarian impulse? A ridiculous assertion.
If you have something to say, try again.
Yes, seeing everything in stark black/white or right/wrong terms not only encourages that way of condemnatory thinking and does you personally no good, it’s also wrong because truth is often not so simple. There are loads of facts/truths in the world, they often seem to contradict because we don’t have perfect understanding, and to make sense of the world we’re prone to cherry-pick the ones that suit us or reinforce our pre-existing beliefs. Hence
Western philosophy going back to the ancient Greeks can be summed up as ‘know thyself’.
Some things should be condemned.
Can Unherd stoop any lower?
What, exactly, is your objection here?
What I said in the comment below. To spell it out for you. Gooch and Starmer, and the judge who sentenced him last year, all smear Robinson as an extremist peddling in hate.
Here Gooch asks why does Starmer approve of the non-crime hate incidents?
It’s what both Starmer and Gooch use to eliminate dissenting voices. Smear someone as Far Right and condemn then for it. It is their modus operandi. Starmer uses prison sentences. Unherd deplatforms.
Perhaps better for your ‘argument’ to choose someone other than ‘Robinson’ to support? Whatever his virtues and his political beliefs, he seems to have made a rather poor fist of his PR, especially with HMRC and the courts.
Robinson is exactly the person everyone should support.
Watch Silenced and then tell me why not.
What a disgraceful writer this Gooch is. He has found a snug home at Unherd.
You’re the pub bore. No one’s forcing you to be here. If you don’t like it, go elsewhere!
It’s like being in an expensive restaurant and they serve you awful food. I’m the one who would complain.
No you’re a fake, a fraud. Someone who would place fragments of glass in their food and then go and complain to the manager.
That makes no sense. I am very precise when I criticise Unherd.
I suspect if they served you good food you’d complain too. Perhaps because you couldn’t tell the difference.
“Why isn’t Labour scrapping non-crime hate incidents?” ?!
A better question:
“Why would anyone ever imagine that Labour would scrap non-crime hate incidents”
NCHI are straight from the New Labour playbook.
This nonsense won’t disappear until people stop voting LibLabCon.
159 million people have watched Silenced. All from abroad. Vance calls out UK for its enemies within and a journalist in prison for reporting the truth.
Every day that goes by the UK’s reputation sinks furrher into the mud.
And what does the media do?
Unherd sticks its head in the sand. And sends out its Robinson-hitman to write this rubbish.
Quite. ‘Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free they are not equal. And if they are equal they are not free’.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Professor David Betz, KCL professor of war, paraphrased: It is very odd. Labour are doing everything possible to promote civil war……. We should be grateful for X. It provides an outlet for the anger which might otherwise find other forms of expression.
If we can expect an equal and opposite reaction, let’s hope this one isn’t proportional.
Private (elite) education runs contrary to equality of opportunity. Adding VAT is a pretty gentle measure in response to that. And in this case what does “any sacrifice” mean exactly? Making it slightly more expensive for elite parents to give their already privileged kids a head start in the race of life?
Adding VAT to private school fees is bad law. The 1972 Finance act created UK VAT. and the tax is charged (or not) by item provided. Food generally free of VAT for example.
You do not have different VAT rates for food sold by Harrods or by the Coop.
But the VAT on private schools does exactly that. It taxes education depending upon who provides it.
It taxes it (presumably) because of the societal impact. Food isn’t education. Only in situations of malnutrition does food give an unfair advantage to some kids over others.
Personally I would be perfectly happy with a reduced rate of VAT on basics with a higher rate on luxury goods. Arguably that’s win/win where Veblen goods are concerned. And if you can afford luxury goods you can afford to pay a bit more tax.
Do folks all appreciate the Code of Practice for NHCIs was instituted under the Tories in 2023, and guess who was the Home Secretary responsible!! Yep Braverman. And she didn’t arrive in the Home Office the day it was launched. And who proceeded her (forget the few days Shapps did it)? Well what do you know, Pretty Stupid, err, Patel.
Good grief I bet virtually zero folks have gone and looked up the definitions and background introduced by Suella and her team. It’s on the Govt website. Now one can then dispute the logic and rationale, but do it from a position of first appraising oneself how it came about.
Your deliberately missing the point (yet again). This type of (absurd) legislation has a 25 year journey, Labour are now in power and they have the power to remove them, it appears that they won’t. Why, read the last paragraph again.
Does it matter who introduced it. Those in parliament think the same way, whichever label they choose. The point is that they are destroying our lives.
It was a very stupid law whoever did it
Why do you persist with the pretence that there’s any real distinction between Labour and the Tories? I can’t imagine anyone else on here is still clinging to that fiction.
Self styled ‘modern progressives’ you meant to say. In fact they are taking us back to the ‘divine right to rule’.
The issue with Labour is its damage to the English Language.
Hate speech ? example – If I say I do not much like trans gender people -is that hate speech ?
I dont think it is . Not much liking someone is not the same as Hating them. But the NCHI seems to categorise any form of dislike at “hate”.
Perhaps if they used language correctly there would be rather fewer NCHIs
There is a very simple solution to all this. Use the laws we already have. If what I say causes you damage you can go to court and prove your case and the court will award you damages.
The court might also say your claim for damages is not proved . In which case you have nothing to complain about.
What the law doesnt do is allow you to be offended and get rewarded for it if there is no damage proven. And that is as it should be. If you offend me I have a number of choices. I can punch you on the nose- illegal. I can publicly call you something rude in response. Or I can ignore it.
There is a word for the regime you describe: totalitarian. It controls everything it chooses to control, even your private thoughts and prayers. Anything it allows is only by its sufferance and that can be revoked at any time for any reason,