I’ve referred in the past to “non-crime hate incidents,” in England and Wales, linking to this brief explainer by Spiked’s Tom Slater from a year or so back. Here’s an extract:
NCHIs are a sinister form of thoughtpolicing. They can be recorded by the police whenever someone is accused of showing ‘hostility towards religion, race or transgender identity’. There does not need to be any evidence of hate – just as with hate crimes more broadly, the only requirement is that the victim or anyone else perceives the motive of the non-crime incident to have been hateful. In other words, literally anything can be logged as a hate incident.
Hundreds of thousands of NCHIs have been logged against Britons – for everything from jokes to tweets and political activism. Memorable examples include…a pensioner beeping her horn too loudly and a dog pooing on someone’s lawn.
As I noted, NCHIs were introduced (without direct parliamentary approval) under the Conservatives, who failed to rein them in, just another of the failures (or worse) that marked their time in office. Sadly, suspicion of free speech in Britain has been shared by its two largest parties (and some of the smaller ones too), although it has deeper roots in Labour.
Maybe, “shocked straight” by defeat and faced by the Reform party’s challenge from their Right, the Conservatives will return to defending free speech. Let’s see. Such a move is needed as Labour’s attack on free speech gathers momentum.
Meanwhile, NCHIs continue to being listed.
Some 13,000 NCHIs were recorded over a year up until this June.
Other incidents recorded recently included a person who refused to shake hands in an alleged gender row and a “rough” haircut reported by a customer who claimed his barber was “aggressive” following a discussion about the war in Ukraine.
Further “ridiculous” claims included a German woman being offended at being compared to a rottweiler and a neighbour who deemed it homophobic to be referred to as “Leonard” in a hedge dispute.