The government says it is trying to stop police wasting time on so-called “non-crime hate incidents,” but peaceful, law-abiding citizens continue to get hounded for such non-events. According to a new report, however, officers are only interested if the hate is directed against someone who is not white.
A report written by Marc Glendening for the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) argued:
Hate speech laws are enforced in a politically partial and inconsistent manner, with police refusing to seek prosecutions for analogous cases when they are directed against white people.
Police, for example, refused to pursue a case against Bahar Mustafa, the welfare and diversity officer of Goldsmiths University’s Students’ Union, who posted the phrase “KillAllWhiteMen.”
The report points in particular to the arrest of individuals for alleged transphobia, homophobia, and Islamophobia.
Glendening said such policing should be non-discriminatory, but in the direction of free speech. That is to say that in order to prevent debate from being silenced, “defenders of political pluralism now need to wage a counterattack based upon a foundational, natural rights-based defence of free speech.”
His criticisms of current speech restrictions were directed primarily at the “‘culture control left’ ideology that sees state regulation of language as the principal way to enforce greater social equality.”
The paper comes at a time when police are asking the government for clarity on how it should deal with those chanting at protests prompted by the Israel-Hamas war. Since Hamas’s attack on October 7th, London’s streets have heard calls of “jihad, jihad, jihad” and “from the river to the sea,” which alludes to wiping Israel off the map. Officials say they have been “disturbed” by the lack of police intervention during such calls, though some campaigners have stressed that free speech rights must not be infringed upon, however “distasteful” the calls.
