Bravo, Kemi, for having the courage to scrap non-crime hate incidents
"This country, which, in 1689, produced the Bill of Rights (An Act Declaring the Rights and Liberties of the Subject), a monument to unageing humanistic thought, is now in the grip of what you might call the Old Bill of Wrongs.
Plod has lost the plot. No doubt about it. Policing is making unwarranted and frankly sinister intrusions into private life. Decent people are harassed for thinking “inappropriate” thoughts (with “appropriate” being whatever is dictated by progressive groupthink, not majority opinion). A stupid, reckless or bad-taste post on social media can get you a knock on the door and one of those Orwellian non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs), which is what had originally been logged against me by Sussex Police before they passed the case on to Essex. As one senior copper quipped in a recent email: “These days, you have more chance of being arrested for an angry tweet about a burglar than for being a burglar.” That’s not a joke, by the way; it’s a crime statistic.
If I ever lose a sense of what I’m campaigning against, some scarcely believable story about police overreach will always come up to remind me. A fortnight ago, at the end of one lunchtime speech to a large gathering, a mother told me she wanted to share what had happened to her family. Her autistic teenage son, she said, had accessed some very worrying content on his phone. When the parents found out that their naive, impressionable boy appeared to be being groomed online by a sinister individual, they confiscated his mobile. Obviously they did; it was the responsible thing to do. The boy was furious with his mum and dad and went off to school muttering darkly. A few hours later, several police officers and social workers turned up at the door; they went through the house, room by room, examining all the electronic devices.
It was unbelievably upsetting – and wrong. The school had not bothered to call the parents, the tearful mum told me. Instead they’d gone straight to the police. On the say-so of their own 14-year-old, a lovely, conscientious Christian couple had a hate incident logged against them. (Would it be wrong to suggest that being Christian would make them even more hateful to our atheist, socialist regime?)
In Maoist China, children were encouraged to denounce their parents publicly for holding “counter-revolutionary” views. How far are we from that in Starmer’s Britain? In March, Vanessa Brown, a history teacher, was arrested by Surrey Police for confiscating her own children’s iPads, which she thought were distracting them from their homework. Mrs Brown said she had suffered “unspeakable devastation and trauma” after being taken to a police station for the “theft”. She was searched, photographed, fingerprinted and held in a cell for more than seven hours. Upon her release, Mrs Brown’s bail conditions meant she was unable to speak to her two daughters as they were “connected to the investigation”. (No common sense, no compassion. How distressing for Vanessa’s girls not to be able to talk to their mum.) Surrey Police, who also visited the children’s school, pulling one of Mrs Brown’s daughters out of class after interrogating her mother, who is in her 80s, have since acknowledged that Mrs Brown was “entitled” to confiscate her kids’ iPads. That’s jolly big of them.
That appalling incident followed the arrest of a couple in Hertfordshire over complaints about their daughter’s primary school. Radio producer Maxie Allen and his partner, Rosalind Levine, were detained at a police station for 11 hours on suspicion of harassment, malicious communications and causing a nuisance on school property after criticising the school’s head teacher and leadership in a parents’ WhatsApp group. I think it’s pretty clear to anyone remotely sane that it was the police, not the parents, who should have been arrested on suspicion of harassment.
Complacent souls who roll their eyes and say, “Well, you don’t get a visit from the police unless you’ve done something wrong,” really need to think again. This coming weekend, if you hum the wrong tune while planting up the containers in the back garden, you may cause a perception of “hostility” to your neighbour over the fence (I promise I am not making this up). Without inquiring into the neighbour’s motives, police can then issue an NCHI faster than you can sing a chorus of Yes! We Have No Bananas.
So much the better for the police if the neighbour is non-white or possesses another so-called “protected characteristic” of religion or sexuality. A Telegraph colleague of South Asian origin, who happens to be more delightfully British than Julie Andrews, was astonished when she reported a crime and the officer said, “It would help if you could say it was racially aggravated.”
Whom exactly does it help if a person claims a crime was exacerbated by the colour of their skin? Look no further than senior police chiefs and the College of Policing, who have a vested interest in our remarkably tolerant society being as hateful and as racist as possible. You see, ladies and gentlemen, that helps to justify all the resources they pour into trawling social media for thought crimes when the general public thinks they should be out on the streets catching criminals. The ignorant, old-fashioned fools that we are!
Here’s an inconvenient truth they don’t want you to know. Despite investing so much time and resources in NCHIs, it now turns out that police have not a shred of evidence that they do what they’re supposed to do: spot emerging community tensions and contain them before they escalate into serious criminality.
Former police officer Harry Miller, who got an NCHI himself in 2020 for tweeting, “Sheffield women know the difference between lads and lasses,” put in Freedom of Information requests to constabularies throughout England and Wales. Harry, who went on to win a stunning victory for freedom of expression against the police in the Court of Appeal, had a strong suspicion that the thousands of NCHIs which are logged every year (64 a day, according to the brilliant Free Speech Union) had no basis in evidence. He was right. Most forces had to admit they carried out zero analysis of the data and so have little idea as to their effectiveness...
In 2023, when she was home secretary, Suella Braverman introduced statutory guidance on NCHIs so that the identity of someone alleged to have carried out an offence could be recorded only if there were a real risk of “significant harm”. Officers were instructed to use their common sense, act in the “public interest” and ordered not to record an NCHI if the complaint were “trivial” or if the incident were not motivated by “intentional hostility or prejudice”.
Police have totally ignored that sensible guidance; almost revelled in doing the precise opposite. (Giving children a record for saying bad things in the playground, seriously?) Prisoners of liberal-Left groupthink, police can no longer be trusted to use their discretion or act in the best interests of the British people.
NCHIs, as Kemi Badenoch says so scathingly, have “wasted police time chasing ideology and grievance instead of justice”, officers are “trawling social media for things someone might find offensive” rather than “fighting crime and protecting families”. No wonder public trust in the police is falling, the Tory leader said. “People see officers distracted from real threats and politicians too scared to act. Keir Starmer needs to stop hiding behind weasel words. Stand up, show some courage, and back real policing over political correctness.”
Consider the gauntlet thrown down. That’s the kind of fighting talk we want to hear from the Opposition. If Labour MPs vote to retain NCHIs, we will know for sure that the Government wants to muzzle free speech, intimidate people and control what they are allowed to think and feel – because they can’t be trusted to support their far-Left agenda.
One final thought for you. The Home Secretary has just had to give in – under huge pressure from the Tory Right and Reform UK, which is set to gobble up a huge number of Labour council seats next Thursday – and promise to publish the nationalities of migrants with the highest rates of crimes in official league tables. It will be interesting to see how many “protected characteristics” turn out to be the wrong ’uns causing misery to innocent people and not the innocent victims of hate.
In which case, our police might consider changing tack and policing to protect the unprotected characteristics – that’s most of us, officer, as you sadly seem to have forgotten."
Left wingers will continue to claim that the police are "far right" and that they "oppress minorities".
