Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

The problem with hate crime | 16 October 2018

It always amazes me that people think it is normal and acceptable to have hate-crime legislation. To have laws which allow for the harsher punishment of people who entertain prejudiced thoughts while committing an offence. To have it written into the actual statute books that the man who punches a Buddhist because he hates Buddhism can be punished more severely than the man who punches a Buddhist because he hates that individual Buddhist for some reason. When are we going to twig that this represents the punishment of thought, of ideology, of belief (warped belief, but still)? I don’t like that Britain has become a country in which people, especially the political class, think it is okay for the state to punish individuals for what they think.

Hate crime is back in the news following the Home Office’s release of new data this morning. They claim hate crime is rising. Between April 2017 and March 2018, there were a record 94,098 hate-crime incidents. This represents a 17 per cent rise from the previous year. It sounds terrible, and I’m sure there were indeed some dreadful crimes and incidents. But we should be sceptical about any talk of a hate-crime epidemic. As the Home Office itself says, the rise in hate-motivated crimes doesn’t necessarily show that Britain has become consumed by racism or homophobia or hostility to Muslims; it is more likely down to the fact that people are more willing to report hate crimes, and the police are more willing to record things as hate crimes.

In fact, this doesn’t quite capture the dramatic shift in the police’s attitudes to hate crimes in recent years. The police are not only more willing to log hate crimes — they actively go looking for them and make it as easy as possible for them to be added to the crime-stat logs.

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