Member

However, even if these provisions do not provide any additional safeguards for protected groups in the criminal law, and I do not believe they do, they will nevertheless send a signal to the police that reports of supposedly offensive social media posts, aggravated by hostility based on sexual orientation, disability or transgender identity, should be prioritised. In April last year, the Times reported that the police arrested over 12,000 people in 2023 under suspicion of having committed an offence for something they had posted online. That is more than 30 a day. Yet, of those arrested, fewer than one in 10—some 1,119—were convicted and sentenced. Do we really want the police to be spending more time on this and, by extension, less time investigating murders, rapes and assaults—more time policing our tweets instead of our streets? That is the signal that the Government will be sending if they add these new aggravators.