In my Spectator column this week I’ve written about a significant free speech victory that has gone largely unremarked in the mainstream media: the publication of a new draft Code of Practice about ‘non-crime hate incidents’ by the Home Secretary. It begins:
On Monday, Suella Braverman published draft guidance designed to rein in the police habit of recording a ‘non-crime hate incident’ (NCHI) against a person’s name whenever someone accuses them of doing something politically incorrect. You may think I’m exaggerating, but in 2017 an NCHI was recorded against Amber Rudd, then the home secretary, after an Oxford professor complained about her references to ‘migrant workers’ in a Tory party conference speech. NCHIs can show up on an enhanced criminal record check even though, by definition, the person hasn’t committed a crime.
The concept first surfaced in guidance published by the College of Policing in 2014 and within five years 119,934 non-crime hate incidents had been recorded by 34 police forces in England and Wales, according to FoI requests submitted by the Telegraph. Nine police forces didn’t respond, but if we assume they were logging NCHIs on the same scale, it’s likely that more than a quarter of a million have been recorded to date. Little wonder the police won’t send anyone round to your house if you report a burglary. They’re too busy investigating people accused of wrongthink.
So this new guidance – in reality, a statutory code of practice that requires the approval of both houses of parliament – is long overdue. Free-speech campaigners like me have been lobbying Conservative home secretaries about NCHIs for years, not least because they’re used as a weapon by political activists and religious zealots to silence their critics. A carefully worded complaint accusing your antagonist of being motivated by ‘hostility’ towards you on the basis of a ‘protected’ characteristic, e.g. your race, religion or sexual orientation, will result in a summons to the local police station. But Suella, God bless her, is the first one to sit up and listen. She recognises that meting out this punishment to anyone who challenges woke dogma is having a chilling effect. “We need a common sense approach that better protects freedom of speech,” she wrote in the Times.
The Free Speech Union has been working hard on this behind the scenes and we’re delighted by the new guidance. Elsewhere, on the FSU’s website, I’ve singled out others who deserve praise for this victory.
First, the ex-copper Harry Miller, who had an NCHI recorded against his name in 2019 when a trans activist complained about him tweeting a comic verse about transwomen. Harry took Humberside Police and the College of Policing to court – first to the High Court, then to the Court of Appeal, backed by the Free Speech Union – and his courageous battle against this unlawful interference in his free speech has helped to win this victory. (You can watch Harry Miller being interviewed by our General Secretary at a Speakeasy here.)
Second, the Conservative peer Lord Moylan. We worked closely with him – as well as Lord Pannick, Lord Sandhurst and Lord Macdonald of River Glaven – to secure an amendment to the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 which gave the Home Secretary the option of bringing forward a Statutory Instrument containing a Code of Practice putting the recording and retention of NCHIs on a statutory footing. That is the option that Suella Braverman is availing herself of – without that amendment, she wouldn’t be able to issue this new guidance.
But this win is no reason for complacency, as I point out in my Spectator column:
Harry Miller is worried some woke police officers will try to get round the new Code of Practice by treating politically incorrect remarks as actual crimes, rather than NCHIs, and petitioning the CPS to prosecute.
That’s not all that fanciful. Last week, I was due to appear as an expert witness for a Christian street preacher called David McConnell who was appealing a conviction for causing harassment, alarm or distress. His crime? ‘Misgendering’ a trans woman. A judge at Leeds Crown Court overturned the conviction without needing to hear my evidence, but we can expect more such prosecutions in future once the use of NCHIs to shut people up has been curtailed. The Home Secretary should be congratulated for striking a blow in defence of free speech this week, but there’s more work to be done.
Worth reading in full.
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During Covid there seemed to be state control of the newspapers only it was the pernicious British government via the advertising spend.
Indeed – which is worse? Hard to say. The British government doesn’t appear to be acting on behalf of the British people and appears to be “follow” directives from “foreign” or “global” entities.
Also what about the BBC? That seems pretty foreign to me, in that it doesn’t share values with me and a lot of others. It’s also controlled by a government.
Well that’s cleared things up.
Foreign states will not be allowed to take over British news organisations but Foreign organisations are allowed to take over the British government.
Nice and tidy.
Chinese sponsorship of UK newspaper will probably also still be allowed. Makes one wonder if the UAE guy perhaps failed to grease the right wheels.
Brown envelopes? British government? Heaven forbid!
Not forgetting all the foreign nationals (aka illegal immigrants) taking over British hotels and holiday camps.
But foreign individuals will still be able to shower them with cash a la Dr Gates presumably.
Can anyone in Scotland attest to this? You have ‘Hate Crime Reporting Centres’ moonlighting as sex shops? WTF is this??
”The Scottish Government has created walk-in snitching centres in every major Scottish city where people can report ‘hate crimes’ under the new Hate Crime and Public Order Act and the one in Glasgow is in a sex shop!
Welcome to Humza Yousaf’s Scotland, where you can go shopping for a dildo and report a ‘hate crime’ at the same time.”
https://twitter.com/toadmeister/status/1767852719761445249
Condoming innocent people…
I would read between the lines. They obviously see a certain pathway ahead that they aren’t speaking about and they are trying to be a step ahead. It would be nice to think that their strategems represent a well-informed attempt to save our future but it is far from this. Just look at the events of the last five years. You can see the level of capture, which has necessitated a level of ineptitude. The strange spectacle of Joe Biden. At first I was a little perplexed why they even let him out in public. And then it was obvious. He is meant to look that way for a number of reasons foremost among them being the tacit cry for help of the Western mythos. Then you had the mad dog theory of war, look it up. And then the arrrogance of victory of the corporate state showing you what they can get away with. Just soberly look at it all. People with huge fibrous growths in their veins and they don’t seem too troubled about it at all. Surely this suggests a lack of vitality and a fatalism resigned to death of our culture.
State ownership or funding of British news organisations (whether they’re foreign states or our own) should be banned. That includes the state funding of the BBC.
There are cliches like ‘the breakdown of the rule of law’. This doesn’t even come close to what is coming. It will come via fifth dimensional warfare on one hand and deepening lassitude among the general public on the other. It might be demoralisation or it might be ill-health and the two will merge into one. You could easily look at the status quo and think that it isn’t even worth bothering with. But that is to give in to the force we oppose. The violinist Jascha Haifetz broke one of his strings during a performance and carried on playing until the end with three strings. Afterwards somebody asked him why he carried on and he said that it is our duty to carry on and try to make something beautiful even with just three strings. Anything less means that you have capitulated.
The whole discussion is ludicrous given the takeover of local radio in the mid 1990s. Local radio was very important largely because ir was decentralised. We weren’t all born under a Chrstmas tree and as Milan Kunera said, the power of man over tyranny is the power of memory over forgetting,
But Foreign Ownership of UK transport, energy, water supplies, steel industry, care homes, government computer systems, supermarkets, and vast tracts of British land, for example, are fine. Well that’s a relief.