The Spectator podcast: The real hate crime scandal | 6 August 2016

Since the vote for Brexit, the media has fallen over itself to cover the apparently large upswing in the number of ‘hate crimes’ being reported. One of the trends noted is a particularly high occurrence of such incidents in areas that voted ‘Leave’. In his Spectator cover piece, Brendan O’Neill argues that there is an ‘unhinged subjectivity’ to hate crime reporting, which has skewed statistics in favour of self-critical moralisation. So, has there really been a post-Brexit surge in hostility towards minority groups or is our metric for recording these crimes simply off-kilter? Brendan O’Neill joins Kevin O’Sullivan, who was recently cleared after spending 20 months defending himself from a hate crime allegation, and Lara Prendergast to discuss. On the podcast, Brendan says:

‘A hate crime is pretty much anything – it’s entirely subjective. And the thing that really amazes me is how everyone always moans about living in this ‘post-truth world’ and everything is supposed to be evidence-based.