Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)

My Lords, I apologise, but it is the return of the double act. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, for tabling this amendment and for his excellent explanation of it. If the previous group was tricky then, yikes, getting rid of hate crime has me asking what I am doing here. I am going to carry on regardless and try to unpack why I think this is so important. One thing that I am very aware of is that the accusation of hate crime or hate speech in any way can make you stutter and stammer and look the other way. The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, told of the abuse that she received and how everybody stayed quiet until the incident was over and then rushed up to her. That reminded me of what it feels like at the moment to have unpopular views. Very often, you are attacked, and then people will come up to you afterwards, squeeze your arm and whisper, “I agree with what you said”, but they do not say it out loud. There are an awful lot of people who look away because they are frightened that they will be accused of supporting hate. The best example, and one that this House has discussed endlessly, is the consequences for the thousands of young women in towns throughout the land who were abused, raped and sexually assaulted because people in official positions—social workers, teachers and people who knew that young women were being abused in that way—were frightened that, if they complained, they would be accused of Islamophobic racist hate. And so they were quiet. The report by the noble Baroness, Lady Casey, makes that clear, as does all the other discussion on that question. In other words, this one is difficult, but we have got to keep going. What is a hate crime? For the purposes of legislators, Lord Sumption, who has already been quoted, explains it this way: “The Crown Prosecution Service and the police have agreed to define a hate crime as anything which is perceived by the victim or anyone else to be motivated by hostility or prejudice. In other words, the definition which they use is subjective. If the complainant thinks it is a hate crime, then it is a hate crime”. That is extraordinarily dangerous, as it inevitably makes it impossible to deny the charge, to say, “I am not a hate criminal, and what I have just said is not a crime”. You have no defence, but it empowers a complainant as a victim who cannot be challenged. It has been proven that this is incredibly divisive in society. It incites people to adopt a victim label. In a period of identity politics and protected characteristics, it undermines equality before the law. In reference to something else that the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, said, in the 1980s, I was active in anti-racist politics. We sought equality before the law rather than discrimination, and made an argument focusing not so much on words but on making sure that people were treated equally, not spoken to nicely in different terms—although that was a bit of an argument, it was never something that was demanded by those of us involved in those fights. Ironically, the aim of hate speech laws for many people is to create a kinder and nicer society, but, as the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, who is not in her place, reminded us at Second Reading, and I am paraphrasing here, certain legislation in the early 1990s raised public expectations that Governments could legislate their way to a harmonious society and eradicate an emotion like hate. Indeed, that is a theme that the Economist feature that I mentioned earlier picks up. It says: “The aim of hate-speech laws is to promote social harmony. Yet there is scant evidence that they work. Suppressing speech with the threat of prosecution appears to foster division … When the law forbids giving offence, it also creates an incentive for people to claim to be offended, thereby using the police to silence a critic or settle a score with a neighbour. When some groups are protected by hate-speech laws … others … demand protection, too. Thus, the effort to stamp out hurtful words can create a ‘taboo ratchet’, with more and more areas deemed off-limits. Before long, this hampers public debate. It is hard to have an open, frank exchange about” controversial issues such as “immigration, say, if one side fears that expressing its views will invite a visit from the police”. That is really what the amendment is getting at. Removing hate crime from the statute books would not mean living in a hateful society. Hate crime on the statute books actually encourages people to be divisively, toxically antagonistic to each other. On aggravated offences—the idea that you get a longer sentence if it is alleged that you are motivated by hate and the concept of stirring up hate—removing specific acts that are crimes from thoughts or the speech behind them dangerously conflates speech and action. When hate crime laws require that the authorities infer a perpetrator’s belief and assign greater punishment based on ideological motive, that can lead to some perverse criminal justice outcomes, which matter to legislators. In the CPS report on recent hate crime prosecutions there was a telling, shocking example. A man was put in jail for 20 weeks for “assaulting his father, sister and a police officer, and using racist slurs against his sister’s partner”. Actually, 20 weeks seems a bit low to me, as it goes. Then the detail was revealed: the CPS explains that, for assaulting his father, his sister and a police officer, the person who was found guilty received a community order. They received the 20 weeks in prison for the racist slur. So for the assault you can retain your freedom, but for the racist words you get 20 weeks in jail. Is that not confusing? There are endless examples that I could cite. It is no wonder that young people in particular, rather than being super-sensitive, as was described earlier, are actually super-sensitive to words they find difficult. They think that speech is violence and cannot distinguish between physical threats, physical harm and what they imagine to be harmful speech, which in turn justifies using physical violence against hate speech that they hear. That was brutally illustrated by the assassination of Charlie Kirk—someone whose politics I did not agree with but who was basically seen to be a hate criminal and, if all speech is violence, you can use violence back. I think these are regressive cultural fruits of vaguely drafted laws that give a vast and subjective discretion, and that is adding to the atmosphere of toxicity and cancel culture. I know that all roads lead back to the review by the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald of River Glaven, but I ask the Minister whether he can explain the point of the review if, when he is looking at provisions such as public order offences and some of these issues—I know he is very concerned about free speech—we are going to just say that the status quo works. Hate crime legislation is getting us in a mess. The Minister says that he absolutely disagrees, but the Government have asked for a review of these very ideas. Surely the Minister might be open-minded to that review, if not to the proposals from the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, and me, or other people who have spoken. Might there be some flexibility from the Minister in thinking that, just possibly, legislators before this Government brought in some bad laws and that, at the very least, we should look at them again? It just may be that hate crime legislation is making society more hateful, is making young people more anxious and frightened and is bad for democracy.