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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
I was brought up with a few simple principles. One was some version of love thy neighbour. Another is often attributed to Voltaire: “I don’t agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to say it”. My strong belief in that statement is partly why I became a journalist. It’s also why I make a point of reading publications I disagree with: they help me decide what I think.
Until recently, I thought I lived in a country where Voltaire’s statement was foundational. It was in England that John Locke penned his Two Treatises of Government and raucous coffee houses shaped the enlightenment. It was in Scotland that John Stuart Mill published On Liberty. Britain’s unique brand of comedy and irony has poked fun at everything and everyone, for centuries. But now, 38 per cent of us say freedom to express opinions without interference is under threat.
Reading the drip-drip of outrageous individual cases, it has been possible to hope they’re just rare examples of over-reach. The couple arrested in their home for criticising their child’s primary school in a WhatsApp group. The bank employee fired for asking an innocent question in a diversity training session. A pensioner and former special constable who was handcuffed and had his electronic devices seized, after tweeting that pro-Palestinian protesters were “one step away from storming Heathrow, looking for Jewish arrivals”.
Unfortunately, the number of cases and arrests is growing as hate speech becomes an increasingly amorphous and muddled concept. What started as a well-meaning attempt to protect people from nastiness has become an arbitrary expansion of state power, foisted on us by both main parties. The Conservative home secretary Sajid Javid said in 2018: “Hate crime goes directly against the long-standing British values of unity, tolerance and mutual respect”. But those values are now being undermined amid confusion and anxiety.
Since 2007, hate crime has been defined in England and Wales as “any criminal offence perceived by the victim or any person to be motivated by hostility or prejudice towards someone based on a personal characteristic”: a dangerously broad definition. Only some groups are protected, prompting endless demands to expand the scope. There have been pleas to formally recognise the homeless, the elderly, even goths (after the murder of a teenager) in hate crime legislation.
Even more Orwellian are the “non-crime hate incidents” introduced after the murder of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence. Offenders have included a 9-year old who called a classmate a “retard”, neighbours fighting over a hedge and a doctor who allegedly misdiagnosed a patient because they were bisexual. Police could be spending up to 60,000 hours a year on this, according to the think-tank Policy Exchange. The current home secretary wants police to use “common sense” but won’t abolish them. Yet the very concept of a “non-crime” is doublethink. It should not exist.
Two recent cases have sorely tested my own commitment to Voltaire’s principle. Last year, a 51-year-old physiotherapist was found guilty of breaching a buffer zone after praying silently near an abortion facility in Bournemouth. I am passionately pro-choice and have enormous sympathy with any woman who felt upset attending that clinic. But I can’t honestly say that the action represented was so intimidating that it should be criminalised.
An even tougher challenge for liberals is Lucy Connolly, a 41-year-old childminder and mother who this week lost her sentencing appeal. Connolly was jailed after last summer’s riots in Southport, which erupted after the murder of three young girls at a dance class by a young man who later turned out to be the son of a Rwandan immigrant. She posted an utterly vile tweet: “Set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards”, deleting it four hours later. Some argue she shouldn’t be in prison: she expressed remorse and has a school-age child. I disagree: she pleaded guilty to inciting racial hatred. But her 31-month sentence feels excessive, longer than some of rioters who caused physical damage. The sentencing judge ruled that she knew how volatile the situation was, and that this volatility “led to serious disorder where mindless violence was used”. That reasoning feels like a stretch. One reason why campaigners are so exercised by her case is that it seems to fit a pattern of over-reach.
Something I have found helpful is the landmark US case of Brandenburg vs Ohio (1969) in which America’s Supreme Court ruled on how to interpret the First Amendment right to free speech enshrined in the constitution. Government can punish inflammatory speech, the court stated, only if it is “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action, and is likely to incite or produce such action”. That feels like a pretty good template: hard-edged, and dispensing with feelings of offence.
The police are put in an impossible position here: dragged into petty resentments and score-settling. Not only does this distract from solving bigger crimes; it is undermining trust in a nation which is not at ease with itself.
It is a fool’s errand to try to police the stirring up of emotions. An area of law which should be crystal clear, both for the police and the public, has become muddled and arbitrary. Irrespective of everything else going on in America, we should look with envy at their First Amendment.
