Police ‘fail to investigate hate speech against white people’
Police are failing to investigate cases of hate speech against white people, a report by a free market think tank has said.
The study by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) said free speech was being stifled by a surge in the number of hate crime investigations.
It meant that people who spoke out on controversial issues such as transgender rights or were critical of homosexuality or Islam risked being investigated by police on the basis that their comments were harmful.
But the IEA report by Marc Glendening, its head of cultural affairs, claimed the laws were being partially applied, with police refusing to seek prosecutions for similar cases directed at white people.
To overcome what he claimed was “rising censorship”, he called for a new concept of free speech, focused on the intrinsic right of all individuals to express their opinions, regardless of their background or views.
“British democracy faces an existential threat from those seeking to silence debate,” said Mr Glendening.
“This is the result of the emergence of a ‘culture control left’ ideology that sees state regulation of language as the principal way to enforce greater social equality.
“This necessarily involves violating the speech rights of individuals who wish to express views considered transgressive.
“Defenders of political pluralism now need to wage a counter-attack based upon a foundational, natural rights-based defence of free speech.”
Mr Glendening cited the trebling of the number of non-crime hate incidents logged by police, which rose from 45,000 in 2013 to 120,000 now.
Among the cases this year was one opened against a pensioner for putting up stickers that said: “Keep males out of women-only spaces.”
In another, feminist Marion Miller was charged under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 for an allegedly transphobic tweet. The case was later dropped.
Christian preachers in Birmingham have been arrested and charged for preaching in public, often based on their critical remarks about homosexuality or Islam.
Yet, Mr Glendening contrasted those cases with the refusal by police to pursue a case against a welfare and diversity officer at a London university who posted the phrase “KillAllWhiteMen”.
In a similar case, no police action was taken against a model who claimed that “white people were brought up racist” and a Cambridge academic who called for an “offensive” to “eliminate white” people as a class.
“It is important to see that this new, more interventionist approach to law enforcement is pursued in a partial and inconsistent way,” said Mr Glendening.
“The police have notably refused to bring prosecutions against individuals in cases that are closely analogous to those described above, save for the fact that they involve racist statements directed at white people.”
Threat to liberal political culture
The report warned the censorious trend was driven by the view that speech must be controlled to prevent alleged “harm” against certain marginalised groups.
He cited Nadia Whittome, the Labour MP, who claimed that debate was not an “innocuous, neutral act” and that the very act of debate “is an effective rollback of assumed equality and a foot in the door for doubt and hatred”.
Mr Glendening warned: “Britain’s liberal political culture presently faces a threat greater than any it has encountered since our country emerged as a representative democracy in the early 20th century.”
The solution, the paper concluded, was to restate the case for each individual’s inherent right to think and peacefully express themselves.
Mr Glendening stressed “the unique importance of independent thought and individual agency”.
