We should abolish “Non-Crime Hate Incidents”
Britain should promote freedom, not Orwellian censorship
MATT GOODWIN
I don’t know about you but these days it often feels to me as though the very things that define our once great country are continually under attack.
Our proud history. Our national identity. Our unique culture. Our shared values. Our distinctive way of life.
And now, as shocking events this week reveal, our belief in free speech, free expression, and individual freedom.
If you want to see how these things are under attack then look no further than the astonishing treatment of Telegraph journalist Allison Pearson, a case that has once again put Britain in global headlines for all the wrong reasons.
On Remembrance Sunday, a day usually reserved to honour our ancestors who gave their lives so that we can have freedom, Pearson heard a knock at the door.
It was two police officers who informed her that an anonymous accuser —sorry, a “victim”— had reported a year-old tweet of hers, claiming it was offensive.
Astonishingly, the police disclosed neither which tweet had been reported nor who had made the accusation against her.
Yet here she was, a national journalist, being told she’s under investigation for something she typed online and asked to head to the local police station.
And nor was this a freak, isolated incident.
In recent days, Britain’s media has been flooded with a series of shocking and deeply disturbing cases of ordinary people, going about their days, only to suddenly be told by police they’re being investigated and marched off to the local police station.
Like the feminist writer Julie Bindel, who was told she was being investigated for a hate crime after a “transgender man” in Holland reported one of her tweets, which he found offensive.
Or the nine-year-old child who was investigated after calling a classmate a “retard”. Or the two schoolgirls who were investigated after suggesting that a fellow student smells “like fish”.
What on earth is going on, you might ask? What has happened to Britain, the home of individual liberty? Is this the country we once knew and loved, or some kind of dark Soviet dystopia?
On the surface, the answer lies in the rise and spread of something called ‘non-crime hate incidents’. Yes, you read that right. Non-crime hate incidents.
Created in 2014, amid the growing moral panic over racism, a non-crime hate incident is any incident that’s perceived by the supposed victim or bystander to be motivated by hostility or prejudice based on a ‘protected characteristic’, such as somebody’s race or perceived race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, and so on.
The key word here is perceived as according to the original guidance the “victim” does not have to justify or provide evidence of their belief, while the police are told not to challenge this perception. Nor, remarkably, is any evidence of the hostility required.
Yes, you read that one right, too. No evidence is required.
What we’re talking about, in other words, is somebody taking subjective offence to something that’s entirely lawful and has been said or posted online by somebody else, and which the police are told to report irrespective of whether there is evidence (because asking for evidence could mean “secondary victimisation”).
I know. It’s completely and utterly insane.
And despite it being a “non-crime”, these investigations still show up on somebody’s permanent record, which could quite plausibly prevent them from getting a job if the role requires a background check.
Let’s say, for example, that somebody happens to write a counter-cultural Substack in their own home, sharing views that are entirely legal but which somebody else happens to find offensive and so reports that Substacker to the police.
The author of that Substack, if they are not investigated and told to head to their local police station, will simply never know if they have a black mark against their name because police are under no obligation to notify them if such an incident is filed.
And this is why these non-crime hate incidents along with “hate laws” more generally are so sinister and damaging.
At exactly the same time as actual levels of racism and prejudice are falling rapidly across Western societies, the rise of these non-crime hate incidents are fuelling a creeping and deeply oppressive climate in which everybody is encouraged to spy on everybody else, the social contract that’s meant to hold us together is eroded, and we are urged to be instinctively suspicious of, if not turn against, one another.
While their advocates would have you believe that non-crime hate incidents create a more ‘inclusive’ and ‘diverse’ community, in reality they erode free speech and free expression by imposing ‘chilling effects’ on society, encouraging people to hunker down, self-censor and watch what they say because they fear what might happen if, like Allison Pearson, they cross the Thought Police.
And more broadly, these totalitarian measures are pushing Britain further and further away from the earlier ‘moral cultures’ of honour and bravery which incubated our ancestors, which rewarded people for being honourable and brave, toward a new, divisive and weak ‘culture of victimhood’, in which people are now only encouraged to pursue social value and social status by redefining themselves as ‘victims’, who are in some way or other being victimised. Aren’t we better than this? Isn’t Britain better than this?
“You’re blowing this out of perspective”, my critics will say. But unfortunately I’m not talking about a few cases. The numbers involved really are mind-boggling, reflecting a legal and political system that’s now spinning completely out of control as an alliance of radical progressives and activist legal institutions suffocate the public square, trying to control the supply and flow of information.
Between 2014 and 2019, some 34 police forces recorded nearly 120,000 non-crime hate incidents in England and Wales. 120,000! Then, between 2019 and 2024, the Free Speech Union estimates the number more than doubled to more than 250,000.
No wonder more than 200,000 burglaries in England and Wales went unsolved last year. And no wonder everything from shoplifting and mobile phone theft now appear de facto legal in modern Britain. Our police are too busy monitoring words at the expense of tackling actual crime.
Take Essex Police, for example, which is overseeing Allison Pearson’s case. In the last two years alone, Essex Police logged 1,500 non-crime hate incidents while simultaneously being criticised for failing to ‘promptly resolve non-emergency calls’.
This is a classic example of what happens when you put the Luxury Belief Class in charge; they prioritise clamping down on vague and abstract notions of ‘hate’ while simultaneously failing to deliver core public services that actually keep people safe.
What our hapless leaders have created, in other words, is an Orwellian legal and political system that’s become more interested in curtailing people’s free speech and expression than dealing with actual crime. No wonder public trust is collapsing.
For a brief moment, there were signs that common sense might be returning. A few years ago, former police officer Harry Miller took the College of Policing to court, after a Humberside police officer said a transgender lyric he had tweeted was step one of five towards genocide, and required “necessary intervention.”
In the ruling, Justice Knowles said,
“The effect of the police turning up at [the claimant’s] place of work because of his political opinions must not be underestimated. To do so would be to undervalue a cardinal democratic freedom. In this country we have never had a Cheka, a Gestapo or a Stasi. We have never lived in an Orwellian society.”
Yet while the High Court ruled that non-crime hate incidents violated Harry Miller’s right of freedom of expression, they also said recording non-crimes was necessary to prevent real hate crime (although I’ve yet to see any convincing evidence for this). A later Court of Appeal decision then disagreed, ruling that Chapter 6 of the Hate Crimes Operational Guidance was not “necessary in a democratic society.”
Either way, more recently the pendulum has swung away from common sense and back toward the kind of madness that would have looked entirely at home in the Soviet Union and KGB HQ.
While the previous Conservative Home Secretary Suella Braverman did try to keep police on the straight and narrow by passing new guidance, urging them to exercise restraint when recording these incidents, the blunt reality is that neither of the old parties, neither Left nor Right, have dared to call for non-crime hate incidents to be abolished. On this, like so many other issues, they are indistinguishable, clinging to an elite consensus that’s more interested in taking away rather than strengthening our freedoms.
And now, worryingly, since coming to power, Keir Starmer’s authoritarian Labour government has made it crystal clear that it intends to double down on this emerging culture of censorship and fear, as part of a broader clampdown on free speech.
We saw this, of course, in the aftermath of the immigration protests in the summer, when many British people were rounded up and locked up after sharing their views on social media, often in the privacy of their own homes.
Like the ex-soldier who, this week, was sent to jail for two years after posting a series of ‘anti-Islamic’ messages on Facebook, including “They want us to be Islamic; that’s why they’re here”, and “Time to wake up the Lion to save our children’s future”.
Look, too, at who Keir Starmer chooses to surround himself with. His new Chief of Staff, Morgan McSweeney, founded the Centre For Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), which was exposed last month to be at the centre of a transatlantic plot among leftists to “Kill Musk’s Twitter”.
In August, at the height of the unrest after the Southport murders, the CCDH met with the Home Office, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, Ofcom, and the counterterrorism internet referral unit at the Metropolitan Police to advocate for “emergency powers” to censor “misinformation”.
I wonder, did they know then what we now know about the alleged murderer, Axel Rudakubana, that he had produced Ricin and downloaded Islamist literature?
And then came Labour’s decision to try and thwart the Higher Education Free Speech Act —which I helped bring in—after it had already been passed in parliament.
The Act, which creates a legal duty on universities to protect and promote free speech on campus, was also clearly at odds with Labour’s instinctively authoritarian impulse so they rushed to get rid of it.
That too was another example of how Labour, like all left progressives, view free speech as an obstacle to their political goals rather than an inviolable right.
And then came reports that Labour’s Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, who joined Keir Starmer in denouncing many British people as “far-right thugs” while completely ignoring their legitimate concerns about mass immigration, plans to repeal the recent guidance on those non-crime hate incidents, brought in by the Conservatives.
In what I suspect will become part of Labour’s broader push to entrench “Islamophobia” at the centre of our national debate, a word that’s now used to silence legitimate and rational criticism of Islam but which has become central to Labour maintaining its increasingly shaky and ultimately unsustainable electoral coalition of Muslims, students, and urban progressives, Cooper says she wants to tighten the monitoring of non-crime hate incidents, including those relating to Islam.
And while Starmer himself has tried to distance himself from the recent scandals over non-crime hate incidents, our new prime minister has said the following:
“It’s important that the police can capture data relating to non-crime hate incidents where it is proportionate and necessary to do so to help prevent serious crimes which may later occur.”
What all of this shows, again, is how radical left progressives like those in the Labour government are always willing to sacrifice free speech, free expression, and individual freedom on the altar of what they see as protecting minorities from perceived ‘harm’, ‘hate’, and the ‘far right’, however broadly these terms are defined.
No matter how many of Labour’s nefarious efforts to censor lawful speech and independent journalism are publicised, the intent to control public debate and contain public outrage remains clear for all to see.
The second-order effect of all this, if we are not careful, will not just be the continuing collapse of public trust in politics but also, and far more worryingly, a collapse of public trust in the rule of law and policing.
Sir Robert Peel founded the police on the principle of consent, that, because “The police are the public and the public are the police,” there must be a bond of trust between them.
But now the British people have clearly concluded that whenever they come into contact with the police they should get out their phone, record every interaction, and not agree to be interviewed without a lawyer.
The default assumption is that the police are out to get the public, on behalf of whatever racial, religious, or sexual minority is offended on any given day.
Which is another reason why, I think, if we are to prevent a breakdown in the rule of law and reinstate the entitlement of lawful free speech as the traditional pillar of English political life, we must not just manage non-crime hate incidents but abolish them completely. We must remember and reassert who we are, a people committed to freedom.
Any insurgent movement must commit to removing these measures from the law outright, and expunge every black mark from the British people’s record.
Otherwise, amid the creeping intolerance that we can all feel around us, amid these relentless attacks on our identity, culture, history, and heritage, we will continue to descend into an Orwellian police state that shows remarkably little if any interest in protecting the very thing that defines who we are on these islands: our freedom.
This article (We should abolish “Non-Crime Hate Incidents”) was created and published by Matt Goodwin and is republished here under “Fair Use”
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