Peer: ‘Hate crime seeks to criminalise certain thoughts’

Britain should re-examine current ‘hate crime’ laws to tackle its “free-speech crisis”, a Peer has warned.

The founder and General Secretary of the Free Speech Union, Lord Young of Acton, has been commissioned by Conservative Party Leader Kemi Badenoch to lead a policy review on freedom of expression.

Writing in The Daily Telegraph he called for a new “unambiguous standard” based upon Lord Justice Sedley’s famous remark: “Free speech includes not only the inoffensive but the irritating, the contentious, the eccentric, the heretical, the unwelcome and the provocative provided it does not tend to provoke violence. Freedom only to speak inoffensively is not worth having.”

‘Laughing stock’

The Peer illustrated his concerns with reference to comedian Graham Linehan’s recent arrest by five armed police officers at Heathrow for a social media post claimed to be ‘stirring up hatred against trans-identifying men’.

He branded such examples “tantamount to criminalising certain thoughts, with courts tasked with peering into the minds of defendants to discover what they were thinking while committing a crime.”

Free speech includes not only the inoffensive but the irritating, the contentious, the eccentric, the heretical, the unwelcome and the provocative provided it does not tend to provoke violence. Freedom only to speak inoffensively is not worth having. Lord Justice Sedley, 1999

Lord Young said: “One of the things I’ll be looking at is whether some speech crimes can be replaced with something more like Sedley’s standard. Instead of stirring up hatred against people with ‘protected characteristics’ being an offence, would it not be simpler – and fairer – to just make inciting violence a crime, regardless of who’s being targeted?”

He also called for non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs) to be abolished, saying the “police’s dogged investigation of hundreds of thousands of ‘non crimes’ in the past 10 years when so many actual crimes go unsolved risks turning them into a laughing stock”.

Fearful

Last month, the head of the police watchdog called for NCHIs to be scrapped. Sir Andy Cooke, His Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary, criticised them for being unfit for purpose and causing unnecessary public concern.

He remarked: “I think we need to separate the offensive from the criminal. We need at times to allow people to speak openly without the fear that their opinions will put them on the wrong side of the law.”

More than 130,000 NCHIs have been logged across England and Wales since their introduction. While they are not recorded on a person’s criminal record, they can appear on enhanced Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) checks.