Following civil unrest after Welsh-born Rwandan, Axel Rudakubana, allegedly murdered three girls and injured ten at a Taylor Swift dance class in Southport, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper promised Parliament that she would act on long-held concerns that “not enough is being done to counter extremism—including both Islamist extremism and far right extremism.” Condemning all demonstrations as “not about grievance [but] … thuggery, racism and crime,” Cooper announced she had ordered the Home Office to conduct a “rapid review” of the Prevent programme to combat “poisonous ideologies that corrode community cohesion and fray the fabric of our democracy.”
But both the priorities of the new Labour government and the conduct of the Home Office and College of Policing should cause concern. Those who value free speech, and want to ensure that the likes of the Southport massacre never happen again, will be targeted by hate crime and counter-terroism operations, all paid for by our own taxes. Here’s how the UK Home Office polices thought-crime in Britain.
In August, the Telegraph reported that Cooper plans to reverse a policy passed by the prior Conservative government which aimed to prevent the police from arbitrarily recording ‘non-crime hate incidents’ (NCHIs). The pretext given? An increase in both “anti-Semitic and Islamophobic hate” in the year since the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7th. A Home Office spokesman promised that,
It is vital that the police can capture data relating to non-crime hate incidents when it is proportionate and necessary to do so in order to help prevent serious crimes which may later occur.
We are carefully considering how best to protect individuals and communities from hate whilst also balancing the need to protect the fundamental right to free speech.
There is reason to be sceptical of this claim. For example, although Muslims are 44% of recipients of hate crimes recorded (not prosecuted) by police, they are also 18% of all prison inmates, despite being only 6.5% of the UK population. Jews, meanwhile, are recipients of 19% of recorded hate crimes, and only 1% of both the broader UK and prison populations. So the Labour narrative that Muslims and Jews are indistinguishable innocent minorities, crushed beneath the weight of British bigotry, isn’t true. Nor do these two religious groups get along without quarrels. Judging by the genocidal rhetoric at the pro-Palestine marches since October 7th, I’d wager much of the rise in anti-semitic hate crimes is due to those in keffiyehs calling for ‘intifada.’ (I’d provide a figure, but the UK government doesn’t publish statistics on offences by ethnicity, nationality, and religion.) The idea that the post-Southport protests were motivated by online misinformation and Islamophobia is also complicated by the inconvenient fact that the false identity of the perpetrator as a Syrian asylum seeker was fabricated by a Pakistani national—against whom charges were inexplicably dropped.
The very nature of NCHIs gives us a warrant to distrust the Home Office’s commitment to protecting free speech. NCHIs are defined as
an incident or alleged incident which involves or is alleged to involve an act by a person (‘the subject’) which is perceived by a person other than the subject to be motivated – wholly or partly – by hostility or prejudice towards persons with a particular characteristic.
NCHIs are recorded whether or not the allegation of hostility or prejudice is supported by evidence. The burden of proof is placed on the accused, who is not required to be informed by the authorities when a NCHI is placed on their permanent record. The College of Policing’s latest guidance says,
Under the code, if an individual’s personal data is processed as part of a NCHI record they should be promptly notified unless the notification presents a safeguarding risk to the complainant.
With the complainant considered a priori a victim, purely by claiming offence and membership of a “protected characteristic,” they are more often than not anonymised, and the recipient never informed. This scarlet letter can go undetected for decades—despite showing up on enhanced Disclosure and Barring Service checks, which can prevent NCHI recipients from getting gainful employment. NCHIs are not policed indistinguishably from crime, but rather more aggressively, as no evidence is required to de facto convict someone, and at no point in the recording process is the accused treated as merely a suspect.
34 police forces across England and Wales recorded 119,934 NCHIs between 2014 and 2019. The Free Speech Union believes this has doubled in the five years since Miller v College of Policing, to over 250,000—an average of 66 recorded per day. No wonder these same police forces have failed to solve 90% of crimes, including not one single burglary across half of all neighbourhoods in England and Wales. Of the more than 1000 break-ins every day in Britain, less than 4% of instances result in a charge. From behind their desks, scouring social media feeds for offensive posts, Britain’s police have de facto decriminalised theft.
NCHIs were introduced back in 2014 by the College of Policing in its Hate Crimes Operational Guidance (HCOG). This was in response to The Macpherson Report in 1999, which reviewed the Metropolitan Police’s conduct during the investigation of the murder of Stephen Lawrence. Macpherson condemned the police as being “institutionally racist.” However, a Civitas report published the following year states that “no evidence of racism on the part of the police was ever produced … Nor was any evidence produced that individual officers dealing with the murder of Stephen Lawrence had displayed racism.” In fact, “No evidence was produced to indicate that the police would have handled the investigation differently had the victim been white.” Instead, the report authors expressed concern that,
Rules of evidence were modified and witnesses were harassed, both by the members of the inquiry team and by the crowd in the public gallery. Representatives of the Metropolitan Police were asked to ‘confess’ to charges of racism, even if only in their private thoughts. They were even asked to testify to the existence of the racist thoughts of other people. It is part neither of the English judicial process nor of English public inquiries to put people on trial for their thoughts. The proceedings bore some resemblance to the Stalinist show trials of the 1930s. …
Some of the Macpherson report’s proofs of racism were circular and self-reinforcing. To question whether the murder of Stephen Lawrence was a purely racist crime was, in itself, adduced as evidence of racism. This was despite the fact that the suspects had been accused of violent offences against white people and were heard, in tape recordings made of their private conversations, to express violent hatred against white people. The tape recordings were quoted selectively, and this crucial fact does not appear in the Macpherson report.
Despite this, members of the wider public are punished with permanent records of thought-crimes, because the Metropolitan Police fears accusations of racism. Just as with the Southport massacre, a high-profile murder was used to manufacture consent in order to expand state power and wield it against the law-abiding public.
In 2014, the College of Policing guidance read, “Where any person, including police personnel, reports a hate incident which would not be the primary responsibility of another agency, it must be recorded regardless of whether or not they are the victim, and irrespective of whether there is any evidence to identify the hate element.”
This led to the classification of anyone reporting a perception-based “hate incident” as a victim, without a burden of proof, and the object of the complaint as a perpetrator. Officers are warned not to engage in “secondary victimisation” by asking the complainant for evidence. Freedom of Information access requests have found that not a single police force can demonstrate the effectiveness of NCHIs in preventing escalation to hate crimes. Neither had police forces conducted any peer-reviewed studies between the first and second versions of the HCOG in 2014 and 2020.
An egregious example of NCHIs occurred when a 14-year-old autistic boy, after buying a copy of the Bible, lost a bet with friends and was told to purchase a copy of the Qur’an as forfeit. When a friend read aloud from it, he knocked it out of his hands. He and three other pupils were suspended from Kettlethorpe High in Wakefield for scuffing the book. A Labour councillor claimed on social media that the book had been desecrated, prompting a panicked West Yorkshire police force into staging an intervention at the local mosque, where the boy’s mother pleaded, before cameras, to spare her family from reprisal. This hostage situation became a permanent mark on that child’s record, which could someday prevent him from getting a job as an adult.
The most high-profile target of NCHIs was former police officer, and founder of Fair Cop, Harry Miller. After posting a feminist lyric to what was then known as Twitter (now X), Miller received a visit at his workplace from a Humberside Police community cohesion officer, who informed him that “We need to check your thinking.” Citing 30 potential offensive posts within 20 minutes, PC Mansoor Gul told Miller that his jokes about transgenderism constituted step one of five towards genocide—requiring “necessary intervention.” When asked where PC Gul had learned this, he said “I’ve been on a course [run by a transgender person] and what you need to understand is that you can have a foetus with a female brain that grows male body parts and that’s what a transgender person is.” Miller was not given the identity of his anonymised accuser, nor told how the complainant had found his place of work.
Miller took the College of Policing to court. 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.”
Given “there was not the slightest risk that [Miller] would commit a criminal offence by continuing to tweet,” his NCHI was found to have “disproportionately interfered with his right of freedom of expression” under Article 10 of the ECHR, and was therefore unlawful. However, although the High Court agreed that NCHIs were tantamount to a “chilling effect” on lawful political views, they stated that Chapter 6 of the HCOG was legitimate in the prevention of crime. (Again, despite no supporting evidence that it achieved this aim.) The Court of Appeal disagreed, ruling that Chapter 6 of the Guidance interfered with Article 10 of the ECHR and thus was not “necessary in a democratic society.”
Then-Home Secretary Suella Braverman urged a revision of the 2020 HCOG. Fair Cop criticised the College of Policing’s autonomous efforts in 2022, for using the “threshold set out in the National Standard for Incident Recording” as the criterion for NCHIs. That threshold read: “A single distinct event or occurrence which disturbs an individual, group or community’s quality of life or causes them concern.”
This is a subjective, perception-based definition, so vague as to be meaningless. Such a definition casts a net wide enough to ensnare political enemies to the utopian project of abolishing all offence taken. As was their definition of hate: a list of synonyms, rendering it circular, self-referential, and intentionally ambiguous. “In the absence of a precise legal definition of hostility, consideration should be given to ordinary dictionary definitions, which include ill-will, ill-feeling, spite, contempt, prejudice, unfriendliness, antagonism, resentment, and dislike.”
Braverman intervened and passed new guidance into law using the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act in 2023. This will prove difficult for Cooper to overturn without an act of Parliament—and Miller has committed to a legal challenge if she tries. However, this guidance, too, was so vague that officers carrying it out can still pursue progressive ends. In the statement announcing the new guidance, Chief Constable Stephen Watson of Greater Manchester Police again conflated the complainants in NCHIs with “victims of hate crime.” This doesn’t bode well for asking his subordinates to “utilise judgement and common sense” when ensuring that recording an NCHI does not “conflict with freedom of expression protections.”
The College of Policing’s training courses have already ideologically primed officers to regard those taking offence as requiring the protection of the state. Therefore, their judgement of what is “trivial, irrational and/or malicious,” and therefore not worth recording, is already skewed. This will only get worse, as the new Metropolitan Police London Race Action Plan, committed to becoming “a truly anti-racist and inclusive organisation,” ties promotions to anonymous “reporting by staff and officers of any racist behaviour and victimisation.”
No prizes, then, for guessing how prudence is exercised when it comes to recording NCHIs now. The Free Speech Union found that, in the year since the revised guidance, NCHIs were recorded 0.4% more—11,690, up from 11,642, in the year from June 2023 to 2024. Some constabularies saw 140% (Staffordshire), 65% (North Yorkshire), and 63% (Gwent) increases. So while the police refuse to catch criminals, courts refuse to sentence them to jail time, and the Labour government releases violent offenders to imprison those making offensive social media posts during the summer protests, the entire justice system remains obsessed with monitoring offensive speech on social media.
In fact, the 2023 guidance arguably made NCHIs worse: disestablishing the “dwelling defence,” and undermining the cornerstone of common law jurisprudence that an Englishman’s home is his castle. The guidance recommends that, “some parts of hate crime legislation do not apply where hostile conduct takes place in a private dwelling. This means that such conduct cannot always be prosecuted as a crime. … Where this is the case, an NCHI should be recorded instead.”
The dwelling defence was one saving grace of the Public Order Act (1986)—the very offence with which I was threatened, in fact, outside Conservative Party Conference in 2022, when a Kent Police constable misheard my conversation with a local journalist, and accused me of “discriminatory behaviour.” Although Miller reviewed the footage, and called it “truly shocking on every single level,” it should surprise nobody given the Crown Prosecution Service’s (CPS) guidance for Public Order Offences in 2022 reads:
In the case of offences under section 4 or 4A of the Act, the racially or religiously aggravated version of the offence is either-way with the maximum penalty on indictment being two years’ imprisonment or an unlimited fine or both. The maximum penalty on summary conviction is six months’ imprisonment or an unlimited fine or both.
Refer to CPS Legal Guidance on Prosecuting Cases of Racist and Religious Crime, and Homophobic, Biphobic and Transphobic Hate Crime.
Meaning at all levels of the justice system, officers, lawyers, and magistrates are motivated to interpret anything less than glowing praise for “protected characteristics” as rhetoric which leads ineluctably to genocide. The feature of “Biphobic and Transphobic” among potential hate crimes shows just how ideologically captured by gender and sexual activism Britain’s courts have become.
The Public Order Act was revised and strengthened in 2023, to criminalise silent prayer in one’s own head within the vicinity of an abortion clinic. Isabel Vaughan-Spruce won her infamous case against West Midlands Police earlier this year. Despite this, Adam Smith-Connor was convicted last week by Bournemouth, Christchurch & Poole council because standing with his head bowed and hands clasped in a buffer zone amounted to “disapproval of abortion.” The Home Office is seeking to go one step further: banning silent prayer explicitly and classifying “anti-abortion” activism as a cause of terrorism.
The dwelling defence was also the source of contention for failure of a first minister of Scotland Humza Yousaf’s Hate Crime and Public Order Bill north of the English border, which criminalised “stirring up hatred” in one’s own home. Comparisons were made to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which children are “systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy on them.” But under the supposedly-improved NCHIs guidance, police in England and Wales already possess this power without need for a trial to determine guilt.
In public or in private, any criticism of the government or its clientele classes with “protected characteristics” will not be tolerated. Even online, Labour seeks to resurrect the “legal but harmful” clause of the Online Safety Act (2023) to compel platforms to remove or restrict the visibility of content decreed dangerous or “misinformation” by government regulator Ofcom. The Metropolitan Police’s Counterterrorism Unit met with activist group the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, alongside the Home Office, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, Ofcom, during the summer protests, to discuss how “emergency powers” can be used to “fight misinformation and deamplify harmful posts” in the future. This extra-legal category of “legal but harmful” speech is merely a means for government, unelected civil servants, and an ideologically-brainwashed judiciary to silence critics and criminalise dissent.
Cliched though it might be to compare all censorship to Big Brother, Starmer’s increasingly unpopular government is taking on the most jackbooted characteristics of Orwellian IngSoc. But they have long had allies embedded in the Home Office, working to thwart the agendas of government ministers who had hoped to do some actual conservatism for once. To wrestle control of the wheel of our self-driving woke state would require a complete clearout of the civil service, College of Policing, and the judiciary. It would also necessitate a repeal of the guidance, laws, and legislation which have legitimised criminalising the private thoughts and conversations of the British public. As of yet, no aspiring insurgent political force has committed to such a task. Until it does, each of us awaits our turn in Room 101.
