Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

What the papers say: When is a hate crime not a hate crime?

Amber Rudd’s speech on foreign workers at the Tory party conference has been reported to police as a hate crime. The Oxford professor who made the complaint said he took issue with what he described as the Home Secretary’s discrimination against workers from overseas. The Home Office has hit back, saying the (now scrapped) suggestion that firms might be asked to say how many overseas staff they employ was not a hate crime. But the way in which police must deal with reports like this mean that if someone reports an incident as a hate crime, police are obliged to record it as such. And the row has provoked an angry reaction in the newspaper editorials this morning:

The Daily Telegraph says this incident should teach Amber Rudd a lesson. In the aftermath of the referendum, a spike in hate crimes was said by the Home Secretary to be proof that the way police were recording such figures was working. ‘But those who live by the sword risk dying by it,’ says the Daily Telegraph. The paper points out that even if the complain against Rudd is obviously ‘vexatious’ there’s a wider argument here. For the Telegraph, this is an issue which delves into ‘the tyranny of elite liberal thinking which labels anything that contradicts political correctness as wicked and wrong’. It’s true that police are no longer investigating this matter. Yet even the incident’s appearance in crime stats should hopefully make Rudd take a closer look at the way crimes are monitored. After all, ‘If something is not a crime then why is data on it being gathered’, asks the paper.

The Sun agrees

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