Amber Rudd’s speech on foreign workers at the Tory party conference has been reported to police as a hate crime. The Oxford professor who made the complaint said he took issue with what he described as the Home Secretary’s discrimination against workers from overseas. The Home Office has hit back, saying the (now scrapped) suggestion that firms might be asked to say how many overseas staff they employ was not a hate crime. But the way in which police must deal with reports like this mean that if someone reports an incident as a hate crime, police are obliged to record it as such. And the row has provoked an angry reaction in the newspaper editorials this morning:
The Daily Telegraph says this incident should teach Amber Rudd a lesson. In the aftermath of the referendum, a spike in hate crimes was said by the Home Secretary to be proof that the way police were recording such figures was working.
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