Hate crime

It always amazes me that people think it is normal and acceptable to have hate-crime legislation. To have laws which allow for the harsher punishment of people who entertain prejudiced thoughts while committing an offence. To have it written into the actual statute books that the man who punches a Buddhist because he hates Buddhism can be punished more severely than the man who punches a Buddhist because he hates that individual Buddhist for some reason. When are we going to twig that this represents the punishment of thought, of ideology, of belief (warped belief, but still)? I don’t like that Britain has become a country in which people, especially the

In recent years the British public have been bombarded with allegations about our alleged bigotry. When we failed to follow the advice of the ‘Remain’ campaign in the EU referendum this ramped up several gears. Since then there has been a seemingly endless parade of pseudo-scientific claims that ‘hate crime has soared’ and the like. This has encouraged politicians and pundits to spend the last two years insisting that while the UK had long been a cauldron, it is now one whose lid is off and where racists are allowed to roam the land, attacking foreigners at will. Some of us – certainly a majority – knew all this to

How easy it would be to be goaded by the visit of Tendayi Achiume, the UN’s “Special Rapporteur on Racism” to Britain. “My mission…will focus on explicit incidents of racism and related intolerance as well as attention to structural forms of discrimination and exclusion that have been exacerbated by Brexit,” she says, as well as “xenophobic discrimination and intolerance aimed at refugees, migrants and even British racial, religious and ethnic minorities”. How tempting it will be for some to tell her to bug off and deal with some real human rights abuses. But I am not going to be goaded, even if there will be many left-liberal-types who will be

The EU holds all the ‘trump cards’ in Brexit talks. Or at least that’s what some ‘Remainers’ would have you think, says the Sun in its editorial today. Don’t believe it, the paper insists, pointing out that the EU 27 ‘export a massive amount of goods to the UK’. In fact, as the government pointed out yesterday in its Brexit position paper on trade, our friends on the continent ‘sell more stuff here than to China, Russia, India and Brazil combined’. All this means that it is ‘massively in their interest to work with Britain’ – a realisation that is starting to sink in, the Sun suggests. Take the report

The great achievement of the Scottish Nationalists is to persuade people outside the borders of their own nation — including the London-based media — to equate them with the Scottish people. Obviously, they are their chief elected representatives just now, but the result of the referendum on Scottish independence quite clearly showed that the equation is false. So when Nicola Sturgeon says there has to be another referendum because of Brexit, the equation should be much more firmly challenged. There is no moral reason why the result of a declaredly UK-wide referendum should require another vote in part of the kingdom (next, UDI for London?). Nor is there a constitutional

I guess the hate crime epidemic that gripped Britain after Brexit hasn’t put that many people off, with new figures showing net migration of 273,000 in the three months to September 2016. That represents a decline of 49,000, of which 12,000 is due to an increase in eastern Europeans heading home (39,000, as opposed to 27,000 the previous year), which I imagine is less to do with any hostile atmosphere in Britain than the booming economy in Poland. No doubt that’s the way it will be presented, though – ‘Poles fleeing the Brexit terror’. In my view, the Government is doing a lot of things wrong at the moment, chiefly

Britain is in the grip of an epidemic, apparently. An epidemic of hate. New figures, compiled by the Press Association, suggest that hate crimes soared to ‘record levels’ in the three months following the EU referendum. Only four police forces around the country recorded a decrease in hate crimes; the others saw a spike. And in the case of three forces – the Metropolitan, Greater Manchester and West Yorkshire – the spike was significant: these forces recorded more than 1,000 hate crimes each post-referendum.  This is being held up as evidence that prejudices and madness were unleashed by Brexit. In truth, the hate-crime spike looks more like a classic crime panic,

With the Home Secretary’s conference speech officially recorded as a ‘hate incident’ after an Oxford University physics professor complained to the police, the academic today appeared on the Daily Politics to explain just why he had spoken out. In an interview with Andrew Neil, Joshua Silver said Amber Rudd’s speech — in which she spoke of her wish to ensure foreign workers ‘were not taking jobs British workers could do’ — was ‘picking on foreigners’: AN: Why’s it picking on foreigners to suggest that British people should need to get on in life? JS: Well, she did say… there were briefings that she was going to keep lists of foreigners. AN: No actually

A New Year is upon us and a new wave of racism, bigotry and xenophobia is meant to be stalking our land. That’s according to a Sky poll released on Monday which proclaimed that ‘Britain is more racist and less happy since Brexit vote’. If this made you check your pulse and wonder what racism has started coursing through your veins since June 23rd, fear not. The headline does not reflect reality but simply some peoples’ perception of reality. It is the result of a question in the poll which asked people not whether they felt more or less racist since last June, but to answer the question ‘Would you

My editor has received a letter of complaint. The SNP MP Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh writes: Dear Fraser, I read Douglas Murray’s blog on Friday “Where’s the proof that Donald Trump is homophobic?” with great interest. It’s fantastic to see the Spectator embracing the zeitgeist and embracing “post-truth” politics in its own right by now ignoring facts when publishing comment. I’m particularly happy to directly answer Douglas Murray’s questions, when he asked: “Where does this endlessly repeated claim that Donald Trump is so anti-gay as to make grown men cry actually originate? What is the source of the claim? Or the evidence?” The evidence is in an interview from Channel 4 News