Do more people now seem to believe that they have a licence to hate? That was the question posed by Farhana Haider’s powerful Radio 4 documentary this week. It gave voice to frontline NHS staff facing a resurgence of racism at work, of a type some said they had not experienced for decades.
That is about social norms – of what people believe is acceptable or not. I doubt it is that the social clock is actually turning back half a century. The profound shift in attitudes among younger generations, in particular, and the much greater share of voice of ethnic minorities ourselves should prove powerful antidotes to reject any such effort. But it only takes one or two per cent of people believing they have a licence for racism for the experience of ethnic minorities to feel as though it is regressing a generation.
Institutions often talk about “zero tolerance” of racism. It makes a difference when they mean it. Yet our society seems to have stumbled into a culture of infinite tolerance for overt racism online, which would be stigmatised in every other social setting, and appears helpless about what to do about it.
The government has announced a change in how “non-crime hate incidents” are recorded: incidents that are not serious enough to be crimes. In reality, it is a minor change. A nuanced College of Policing report noted there were just 9,305 such incidents across 34 police forces within a million other anti-social behaviour incidents. This "starkly illustrates that NCHIs form only a very small proportion of the non-crime demand coming into policing”. The police will now record what is useful to crime prevention, with more clarity on separating this from actual hate crimes.
“Under these reforms, forces will no longer be policing perfectly legal tweets. Instead, they will be doing what they do best: patrolling our streets, catching criminals and keeping communities safe,” home secretary Shabana Mahmood declared.
Toby Young’s Free Speech Union celebrated that sentiment. It directly echoing its slogan “police our streets, not our tweets”. This catchy slogan fails to differentiate between a legitimate and illegitimate version of their argument. The police should not try to criminalise behaviour that is lawful – but nor should it ignore serious criminality, simply because it takes place online. Some want to blur those boundaries. When right-wing blogger Matthew Goodwin declared it “insane” to imprison a man for what Goodwin described as merely “anti-immigration tweets”, he did not quote the words that had led to prosecution: "Start the slaughter. Violence & murder is the only way now. Burn every migrant hotel then head to MPs’ houses. We need to take over by force”. Policing incitement to murder is part of protecting the streets.
Unfortunately, I have found the new government policy being loudly celebrated by racist trolls, who heard in it renewed permission for actual hate crimes. In principle, it could be argued they had misunderstood the small print. In practice, the strong perception of the racist trolls – that they do have de facto impunity for hate crimes – will not be shaken unless much more is done to show that they do not.
The Home Office says it ensures the “robust” use of existing hate crime legislation “wherever conduct meets the appropriate threshold”. That idealised account of a parallel universe has no resemblance to what actually happens with sustained online harassment and hatred. The police lack the capacity to act on this tsunami. Major platforms simply ignore their legal duties to remove it. Social media platform X protects abuse using the p-word racial slur more than 98 per cent of the time. Ofcom has spent four months exploring whether it can spot a systemic failure.
The government says its social cohesion action plan sets out how it will “tackle rising levels of unacceptable hatred and discrimination against minority groups in Britain”. Yet the plan exemplifies a little-noticed asymmetry in the Starmer government’s approach to hate crime. It has made laudable efforts to strengthen the response to religiously motivated hatred – keenly aware of how conflict in the Middle East has put more pressure on Jewish and Muslim communities. Religiously motivated hate crimes spike to 10,000 incidents a year.
There were ten times as many hate crimes that were racially motivated. But this government has found no bandwidth to engage seriously with racial hatred that is not religiously motivated. It was four prime ministers ago – between the Brexit referendum and the Covid pandemic – that the government last had a hate crime strategy. There would be useful synergies with its strategy to address drivers of misogyny.
The prime minister expressed disappointment, even surprise, last autumn at NHS frontline staff experiencing a resurgence of racism “that frankly I thought we had dealt with decades ago”. Expressing bemusement at the irrationality of racism will be insufficient without a much stronger effort to explore the drivers and antidotes too.
