Hate crime

The question was direct and to the point, ‘Are you one of them blokes?’ With those six short words, I was the victim of blatant transphobia. We have been advised to report such attacks. ‘We need the stats,’ explained one transgender campaigner in 2018. That was in response to ‘hateful’ stickers which read ‘Female is a biological reality’ appearing in Edinburgh. This attack was personal and in my face. But if this was transphobia, I was in no danger. The woman who asked the question was in her 60s, laden down with groceries and she would have needed to stand on a box for it to be truly in my

I couldn’t quite believe it when first I read the newspaper subscriber’s letter. Columnists for the Times and Spectator do still get real letters, and this one from (shall we say?) Mr Jones had enclosed the copy of a letter he had written to a lady whom we shall call Mrs Smith. Mr Jones had read about the public protest she was leading last year against an Emmerdale episode in which a couple, after much agonising, choose to abort their Down’s syndrome baby. Mrs Smith has a Down’s syndrome child, whom she adores. Mr Jones’s letter to her defended the broadcaster’s right to show parents who make a different choice.

At a time when resources are scarce, the Merseyside Constabulary must have thought long and hard about its recent advertising campaign: a stern message to the people of the Wirral. ‘Being offensive,’ it declared, ‘is an offence.’ The slogan was put on a van along with text urging the public to inform on transgressors. Four officers posed beside it for a photograph, as if standing ready to enforce its orders. The police only recognised their error after a public outcry. ‘We would like to clarify,’ said Superintendent Martin Earl, ‘that “being offensive” is not in itself an offence.’ On its own, the incident is merely an embarrassment, but it represents

Is being offensive an offence? Some of those at Merseyside police who are tasked with upholding the law think so.  Over the weekend, officers from the force posed in front of an electronic billboard telling passers-by that ‘We will not tolerate Hate Crime on any level’. The warning displayed behind the masked officers also told members of the public that ‘being offensive’ is indeed a crime. Now, it seems, Merseyside police has changed its mind. ‘We would like to clarify that being offensive is not in itself an offence’, said a statement put out by superintendent Martin Earl: ‘A message on an ad van and social media this weekend by the Local Policing Team on the

Sir William Macpherson of Cluny has died. His obituaries praise him for his 1998 inquiry into the Stephen Lawrence case. His report did indeed shed light on the failure of the police to catch the young man’s killers. It has had, however, a profound and bad effect on our law. The report’s recommendations redefined a racist incident: ‘A racist incident is any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person.’ This definition means that absolutely anything in the world could be a racist incident, because it relies wholly on what a complainant ‘perceives’. The definition’s use of the word ‘victim’ also implies acceptance that

Facebook has been accused of failing to combat extremism and hate-speech among its users. But as I found out this week, sometimes it does far too much to take down controversial opinions. Coffee House recently published an article by me with the headline ‘Michael Parkinson is right: men are funnier than women’. In the piece, I argued that men are more adapted to and adept at humour because they are less grounded in reality and more at home with incongruence. I said that because humour is often based on cruelty and schadenfreude it is also suited to the typically more aggressive male mindset. In short, I said that men and women were

When Humza Yousaf, the SNP’s cabinet secretary for justice, announced that his new Hate Crime Bill would remove the ‘dwelling exemption’ in the Public Order Act 1986, people were understandably horrified. As things stand, you cannot be prosecuted for stirring up racial hatred because you’ve said something inflammatory about race or religion in the privacy of your own home. But that’s far too wishy-washy for Yousaf. Not only does he want to enlarge the number of ‘protected’ groups, he also wants the new speech restrictions to apply in people’s homes. Henceforth, Big Brother will be watching you in the kitchen and the bedroom. If Humza Yousaf has his way, there

It’s open season on mavericks and dissenters at the moment. If you publicly challenge any of the sacred nostrums of the social justice left and you work in a school, a college, a university, an arts company, a public broadcasting organisation, a tech company, a charity, a local authority or, indeed, Whitehall, you are at risk of being cancelled. How do I know? Because in February I set up the Free Speech Union to protect those being targeted in this way and in the past month we’ve been contacted by people in all of these fields who have either been fired, suspended or are ‘under investigation’ for having said or

A mystery has occurred. In The Affluent People’s Republic of North London, a rabbi was stabbed on the street multiple times by a knifeman. Rabbi Alter Yaakov Schlesinger was rescued by two builders and a Deliveroo driver and is now in hospital, where hopefully he will recover. Apparently no robbery was attempted. The police, however, have said that this was not a terrorist incident, thus suggesting – by extension – it was also not a hate crime. A crime of love, or indifference, then? Who knows? All a mystery. A familiar mystery.

It is 178 years since the last recorded charge of blasphemy in Scotland, against the Edinburgh bookseller Thomas Paterson for ‘exhibiting placards of a profane nature’ in his shop window in 1842. One of those placards announced that ‘Paterson & Co (of the Blasphemy Depot, London)… Beg to acquaint infidels in general and Christians in particular that… [we] will sell all kinds of printed works which are calculated to enlighten, without corrupting — to bring into contempt the demoralising trash our priests palm upon the credulous as divine revelation — and to expose the absurdity of, as well as the horrible effects springing from, the debasing god-idea.’ For good measure

The Guardian ran a story on its website today headlined: ‘Hate crimes doubled in England and Wales in five years.’ Alarming if true, but is it? The story is based on some data released by the Home Office today which, on the face of it, does appear to show the number of hate crimes increasing. The number of hate crimes recorded by the police in England and Wales in 2018-19 was 103,397, up from 94,121 in 2017-18, a rise of ten per cent. But drill down into the report, and the picture becomes more hazy. The word doing most of the work here is ‘recorded’. Yes, the number of recorded

Some years ago I was introduced to one notion of how to tackle dishonest and insincere accusations of racism. It was not just that there should be a social cost to making a dishonest claim, but that the cost should equal that borne by somebody who is accurately and correctly identified as a racist. Without such a disincentive there is no reason (other than decency and honesty, which may sometimes be in short supply) for people not to level such accusations insincerely in order to beat away any and all critics. Since Monday night I have been wondering, amid much else, whether some similar aspiration could be encouraged regarding hate