Politics: friendly missiles

By Richard North - November 19, 2024

Russian state television is illustrating the countries in Europe which will be hit by nuclear weapons if the Ukraine-Russian war intensifies, with the warning that: “All it takes is three missiles and British civilisation will collapse”.

Looking at some of the headlines in today’s newspaper’s, though, the informed observer might be forgiven for thinking that British civilisation has already collapsed, in which case a trio of Russian nukes would be a mercy, putting the nation out of its misery.

One of those headlines, in particular, has The Times telling us that Essex constabulary have recorded 1,500 non-crime hate incidents in the last two years, one of which related to a shopkeeper refusing entry to his shop to someone who had a guide dog with them.

In parallel with that, we have the Telegraph headlining a report with, “Police should focus on violent crime and burglaries, not social media, says Starmer”, the prime minister’s response to the furore over the investigation of Allison Pearson’s tweet.

That the prime minister of this land feels the need to intervene on this controversy tells us a lot about the state of the nation, where a significant amount of police time and effort is now dedicated to chasing down people who have expressed view on social media and elsewhere on the net, potentially committing crimes, the maximum penalty for which is seven years in prison.

With that, Starmer is urging police forces to “concentrate on what matters most to their communities”, asserting that chief constables who prioritised looking into complaints about allegedly offensive tweets would be “held to account for those decisions” – something which is unlikely to happen as the police are largely unaccountable, particularly to their local communities.

Certainly, it does not look as if Essex plods are going to get any flak in this direction as the elected official responsible for monitoring police performance – the policing and crime commissioner – is on record for defending the force’s handling of the Pearson investigation.

This is Roger Hirst, the successful Conservative candidate for the job, who told an LBC interviewer: “I have no view whatsoever on the issue of guilt, but it is my job to make sure that the police act even-handedly and we will have no two-tier policing in Essex. Everyone’s equal under the law and if there is a complaint made, then the police are duty bound to investigate it.

He has a point, but not a very good one. It is clearly a matter of discretion as to whether the police decide to investigate particular crimes, either individual incidents or groups as a generic type – hence the decision of some forces not to intervene on shoplifting unless the goods stolen are valued at over £200.

In supporting the police in this matter, though, Hirst is acting entirely in character for a Conservative politician as it is his party, more than any other, which has elevated “hate crime” to its dominant position in the statute book and in police priorities.

The main enactment setting the pathway for creating the offence of “hate crime” is of course the Public Order Act 1986, which came into being under the Thatcher administration – that doyen of personal freedom.

This was amended in 2008 by the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act. Promulgated under Labour’s Gordon Brown, it added provisions on sexual orientation and criminalised the use of words or behaviour or display of written material, publishing or distributing written material intended to stir up religious hatred.

Before that, the Thatcher administration also produced the Malicious Communications Act 1988 and then, after the murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993, the concept of hate crime took a tremendous boost, with the publication of the inquiry report in 1999 – which was on Labour’s watch.

It was thus Blair’s government pre-empting the inquiry with the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 which brought “racially aggravated crime” onto the statute book and laid the legal foundation for much of the hate crime policing that we see today.

This was further enhanced by the Sections 145 and 146 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003. Section 145 requires the courts to consider racial or religious hostility as an aggravating factor when deciding on the sentence for any offence (which has not been identified as a racially or religiously aggravated offence as outlined above). Section 146 has the same effect for sexual orientation, disability or transgender.

But it was Cameron’s coalition government, elected in 2010, which really put hate crime policing on the map, with the publication of an action plan on hate crime in 2012, entitled “Challenge It, Report It, Stop It”. Not content with that, it produced a follow-up report in 2015.

Another action plan followed in July 2016, after the EU referendum, under the aegis of home secretary Amber Rudd, after the former home secretary, Theresa May, had taken over as prime minister after the resignation of Cameron.

These action plans, more than anything, have formed the basis of hate crime enforcement, right up to this day, although we also have additional legislation passed under the Sunak regime, in the form of the Online Safety Act 2023.

Primarily, this means that Starmer – with no opportunity for his home secretary to add her own imprint – is simply inheriting policies developed by the coalition and Tory administrations, built on a composite skein of legislation passed by multiple administrations.

It is ironic, therefore, that the Telegraph, apropos the Pearson controversy, is now editorialising on Britain facing “a sinister threat to free speech”, complaining that “until we get a government willing to change the law, a small minority of activists will retain the ability to comb wording for offence”.

It homes in on cases of “overzealous police officers choosing to focus their efforts on policing thoughts and speech rather than cracking down on violent crime or theft”, suggesting that many overseas are watching, and appear horrified that in a supposedly free and democratic society journalists and politicians can face criminal investigation for expressing strongly worded opinions.

The paper recalls that former Conservative MP Tom Hunt has set out how he was reported to Suffolk police for a non-crime hate incident that may still be on his record, and criticised forces for “spending time registering this nonsense when they should be on the street making people feel safe”.

We are also told of Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, who has insisted that officers “shouldn’t be wasting their time on these sorts of issues”, expressing concern over police actions, noting that “those of us who have grown up in an era of free speech just can’t understand the way things have developed”.

And this is where the informed observer has good cause to worry about the state of British civilisation. People such as Richard Dearlove should be well aware of the reasons why things have developed the way they have.

The incremental accumulation of legislation over nearly forty years, passed under successive administrations of all major parties, bolstered by “action plans”, guidance notes and, police practice notes and statutory codes, have all combined to create an impenetrable web of restraint that was never designed by anyone or specifically intended to have the effects we are now experiencing.

The system has unwittingly created a monster, which is quite clearly out of control, and which creates situations which have the potential to cause great harm.

As to the unwitting progenitor of the current controversy, the Press Gazette has recovered an archive copy of the original Pearson tweet, which turns out to be identical to the post attributable to the lower-case pearson. There is no mistaken identity.

And, at last, la Pearson seems to be coming to terms with the fact that her tweet is not being investigated as a NCHI but as a full-blown criminal offence under the Public Order Act.

Such has been the cloud of disinformation, though, that The Times is now trying to explain what Pearson did wrong. I don’t think it’s really got the measure of the situation, but if friendly missiles, in the manner of John Betjeman, fall on Britain, I don’t suppose it will matter very much.