If Amber Rudd doesn't like being investigated for a 'hate incident', she should change the law

At last October’s Conservative party conference, Amber Rudd revealed a rather silly proposal that companies operating in the UK should be obliged to publish data on the number of foreign workers they employ. It was rightly condemned and Rudd later said that the information would not be published, only used by the government to identify areas of skills shortages among British workers.

But a ‘hate incident’? That is exactly how, it transpires, the police recorded it. When you read the inevitable headline in a few months’ time that ‘hate incidents have soared’, you may just want to reflect that one of them was a speech by the Home Secretary. It turns out that Professor Joshua Silver, an Oxford physicist, was listening to the speech – which also contained proposals to deport migrants convicted of minor offences and to tackle modern slavery – and reported it to the police as a hate crime.