Contribution
My Lords, I wish to speak briefly in opposition to this amendment, but I will resist the temptation to give a Second Reading speech. My understanding is that it would abolish the entire statutory framework relating to hate crime and hatred-based offending.
I have been a blatant homosexual for many decades, and part of that look means that you evoke some hatred as you walk around the streets—the streets of Cardiff in 1993, certainly, when no hate crime legislation existed in relation to sexual orientation. The message I got at that age was that the state agreed with the offences that I was experiencing, because I did not know that the state supported me.
Within the last year, when I was in Shoreditch, a group of men surrounded me and my partner. They got up in our faces and used unequivocally homophobic language. We did not report it as a hate crime, but we were frightened and discombobulated. My response was, “But it’s Shoreditch”, which was my middle-class shorthand for, “There are so many lesbians in this area. What exactly are you going to do if you think that this hate is going to be acceptable here?” I did, however, feel utterly supported by the state a year ago, because I knew that legislation existed that made that kind of offence unacceptable.
As has been outlined, there is no single offence of hate crime. What exists is a framework across several Acts. There are aggravated forms of certain basic offences, and I look forward to the Government’s amendment on Report, as in their manifesto, relating to disability, sexual orientation and gender identity. There is enhanced sentencing, where hostility is proved on grounds of race, religion, sexual orientation, disability or gender identity. There are offences such as stirring up racial or religious hatred. It is my understanding that this amendment would dismantle that network in its entirety.
Those who have concerns about the recording of non-crime hate incidents, which I have sympathy with, or about proportionality in relation to hate crime, which I also have sympathy with, can and should address those matters directly. But those issues are distinct: wholesale repeal of criminal protections is not a measured response, in my view, to broader free speech concerns.
I find it impossible to ignore the context. Official Home Office figures record 137,550 hate crimes in England and Wales in the year ending March 2025. As a resident of Bethnal Green, I am acutely aware of hate crime in relation to antisemitism and anti-Muslim sentiment. It exists across all the streets; the graffiti is going up and up in relation to both those things. On antisemitism specifically, the same Home Office bulletin records 2,873 religious hate crimes targeted at Jewish people in the year ending March 2025, and notes that the previous year saw a very sharp rise and spike following the start of the Israel-Hamas conflict. In addition, the Community Security Trust recorded 3,528 antisemitic incidents across the UK in the calendar year 2024. I share that data because what we measure, we manage. Understanding these spikes and seeing these patterns matter. What the hate crime legislation gives us is a mechanism for measuring and managing those spikes and incidents.
Where reporting shows acute risk, His Majesty’s Government have acted. In October 2023, the Conservative Government increased the Jewish community protective security grant to £18 million for 2023-24, and that figure was maintained in 2024-25. That is right and proper as a reasonable and justified response to that spike in hate crime, which was measured because this legislation exists.
One can believe deeply in freedom of expression; I sympathise and actually agree more than people might think with the previous amendment, and with some of the comments we have had so far. But the law must recognise and respond to crimes intended to intimidate whole communities. In my view, this amendment would remove the very tools that allow the police and the courts to identify, mark and properly sentence hostility-motivated offending. For those reasons, I would request that this amendment be withdrawn.