Hate Crimes For Me But Not For Thee

Hate Speech and its redundant role in the English Legal System

My speech from Battle of Ideas - Saturday 28th October 2023

Photograph by Stuart Mitchell

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Last week was National Hate Crime Awareness week and, one could say, the most successful one to date. Starting nine days after the October 7th massacre in Israel when Hamas terrorists butchered 1400 Israelis and took 224 hostage, the streets of London were alive with anti-semites and anti-zionists chanting for jihad and genocide. Many sang “from the river to the sea…” and some even calling for slaughter of the “Yahood”. London was flooded with hate. And thanks to social media, we all saw it.

Obviously this new awareness of hate is not something we’re actually happy about. Not just because it took a horrific tragedy to provoke, but because it seems firstly that anti-semitic hate is endemic in the UK, but also that the British police have done sweet diddly bupkis about it. Well, they managed 10 arrests of the 100,000 plus crowds.

You will all of course remember when the Humberside Police visited Harry Miller for tweets such as "I was assigned mammal at birth, but my orientation is fish. Don't mis-species me." Or when the West Midlands Police had no trouble arresting Isabel Vaughan-Spruce for silently praying in a Birmingham suburb. Or when the West Yorkshire police arrested a 16 year-old autistic girl for calling an officer a “lesbian like nana”. Or the Merseyside Police who arrested an 18 year-old girl with Asperger’s for posting Snoop Dogg lyrics on Instagram.

Need I tell you about the tens of thousands of girls that have been habitually raped, trafficked and abused by grooming gangs up and down the country. Some of the girls were murdered - Lucy Lowe, Becky Watson and Laura Wilson for example. All of whom should be household names, but are not. Racist murders, because they were white, and the police did not act because they themselves were too terrified to be labelled racists. In the 14-year history of the National Hate Crime Awareness charity, these vilest of all hateful acts were never given attention. I cannot conceive of a more hateful crime.

Last week, during National Hate Crime Awareness week, amidst hoards of anti-Israel/pro-Palestine protests, the police instead took the time to stop Campaign Against Antisemitism from screening pictures of Israeli hostages on the side of vans around central London. They took take time to stop people from waving England flags. In England I remind you.

Meanwhile extremist group Hizb ut-Tahrir were freely soapboxing for Jihad, but the Met excuse them, telling us there are “varying interpretations of what the language means”.

What does this all go to show? It shows that the word “hate” is an utterly redundant term when used in the English legal system. From the police to the courts “hate” only counts when the correct people are being hated. If the hated are deemed “privileged” say they are white, Jewish or if it is Israel, then fill your boots with hate. But if the correct identity group is perceived to be the victim of this wooly word “hate”, then prepare to see the police kick into action.

So a brief history of “hate” in English law…

This goes back to the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993. In an attempt to prevent further such incidents the concept of a “hate crime” was born. This evolved on two paths. The first path was through the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 (Section 28-32), which The Crown Prosecution Service described as aiming at “outlawing crime where offender is motivated by hostility or hatred”. Cemented later in Section 66 of the Sentencing Act 2020 where a seriousness of a crime must consider racial, religious, hostility or hostility related to disability, sexual orientation or transgender identity.

The second path was through the beloved Non-Crime Hate Incidents (NCHI).

“A non-crime hate incident means an incident or alleged incident which involves or is alleged to involve an act by a person which is perceived by a person other than the subject to be motivated - wholly or partly - by hostility or prejudice towards persons with a particular characteristic.”

120,000 NCHIs were recorded in the last five years. If you have one on your record you have no means of knowing. But your future employer does. The significance is that although perceived hate crimes can lead to arrest, they cannot be prosecuted without evidence. An NCHI, on the other hand, does not need evidence to stick to your record.

Met police guidelines include “incitement to hatred” defined as “when someone acts in a way that is threatening and intended to stir up hatred in words, pictures, videos, music”. Under this alone there should’ve been hundreds if not thousands of arrests at the pro-Palestine marches.

Indeed there are numerous surah in The Koran inciting hatred and actual violence against infidels and Jews. Under these laws publishing The Koran in the UK is technically illegal.

Our free speech is protected by Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. But it is limited - incitement to violence is illegal as per the Serious Crime Act 2007. The Terrorism Act 2000 makes criminal “expressing an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organisation”. This will chafe American First Amendment enthusiasts.

"Being offensive is not, cannot and should not be an offence,” Harry Miller rightly declared. Something is either a crime or it is not a crime. The concept of “hate” adds nothing. All it has done, in practice, is follow the fault lines of poltical correctness, with police wasting their time and our money on what they can claim as small victories.

We need free speech, not only so bad ideas can be challenged with good ones. But, as we have learnt this month, so that we know exactly what people think, and so, like we saw in National Hate Crime Awareness week, we can see the scale of the problem.

I hate antisemitism, I hate peadophilia, I hate injustice, I hate Chelsea Football Club. Hate is not always bad and does have some place in our lives. But “hate" in the legal system is token, pointless and joined at the hip with political correctness.

WM