Crime and Policing Bill

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 15th January 2026 Lords Chamber

Current hate speech law goes too far in criminalising words and thoughts. Basic freedoms are being trampled on. Frank expression of thoughts, fears or perceptions is suppressed. Setting people free to speak their mind can indeed result in ugly or upsetting scenes. Most of us wish to be courteous and hate upsetting anyone, but some people get upset easily. Moreover, bad actors can and often do claim to be, or perform being, upset. No free society should encourage that by overcriminalising words. I beg to move.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I have added my name to Amendment 382F, an amendment that, carefully and proportionately, takes on tackling the problems of the ever-growing number of overlapping Acts and statutes that are used to limit free speech. If public order laws on protest are, to quote the Liberal Democrat Benches from the other day, a confused mess, the labyrinthine patchwork affecting free speech is an impenetrable quagmire. The noble Lord has done a real public service here by carefully going through how, inadvertently and often by mission creep, censorious laws undermine democratic speech rights and are actually damaging the UK’s reputation internationally.

I am not just talking about JD Vance or Elon Musk, who I have heard commented on in this House and dismissed sneeringly by many in Westminster as spreading just Trumpist misinformation or hyperbole. We need to recognise that even the bible of globalist liberalism, the Economist, no less, featured a cover last May proclaiming “Europe’s free-speech problem”, identified the UK as one of the most censorious on the continent and provided a lot of evidence. There has been lots of discussion all over the political spectrum in relation to the idea of 12,000 arrests a year, 30 a day, for speech offences that spring from laws that the amendment seeks to rein in, and for which this House is responsible. We are talking here about crime and policing, and the police are expected to treat speech offences as criminal acts and to police them.

Since the introduction of hate crime laws, which I remind the Committee is a relatively recent concept popularised from the mid-1980s, the legislative and regulatory implications of restricting hate and words that are said to have caused distress have proliferated, and it has grown into a real tangle of tripwires. In that tangle, many people in the police and the CPS, and even politicians, seem confused about what one can say legally and what is verboten.

I am sure that noble Lords will remember the extraordinary story of the Times Radio producer, Maxie Allen, and his partner, Rosalind Levine. They were the couple who were arrested by six uniformed officers, in front of their young children, for posting disparaging messages about their daughter’s school in a private WhatsApp group. It received a lot of publicity, and they have just been paid £20,000 for wrongful arrest, although they have not received an apology. What stood out for me about that story was that when the police officers went into her house, Ms Levine asked what malicious communication offence they were being accused of. The detective did not know, had to Google it and then read out what Google said. That strikes me as not healthy. We as legislators have a responsibility to tackle this. Too often, we just pass more and more laws, with more restrictions on freedom, and never stop to look at whether anything on the statute book can be repealed, streamlined or rolled back.

I commend the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan of Chelsea, for his detailed, well-thought out and proportionate attempt at tackling the way the law has grown and the negative impact that is having on democratic free speech. I also want to commend him for his courage in taking on this issue. As we know, and he referred to this, if anyone takes on hate speech laws, you just think, “Oh, my goodness, he’s going to be accused of all sorts of things. He’s going to be accused of being a bigot. It’s a risk”, so when he told me he was doing this, I gulped. It is horrible to be accused of being a racist, a misogynist, homophobic, a hatemonger, or whatever, but that is the very point. Being accused of being pro-hate speech, if you oppose hate speech legislation, is itself silencing of a democratic discussion on laws and we as legislators should not be bullied or silenced in that way. Ironically, the best tool for any cultural shift in relation to prejudice, in my view, is free speech. To be able to take on bigotry, we need to be able to expose it, argue against it and use the disinfectant of free speech to get rid of the hate, whereas censorship via hate speech laws does not eliminate or defeat regressive ideas; it just drives them underground to fester unchallenged.

The noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, has laid out the key legal problems in his approach to this, especially in relation to the lack of precision in terminology used across speech-restricting laws. He has raised a lot of real food for thought. Perhaps I can add a concern from a slightly different perspective, to avoid repeating the points he has made. For me, there is another cost when law fails to clearly define concepts such as abusive or insulting words, grossly offensive speech, and what causes annoyance, inconvenience and needless anxiety—these things are littered all over the law. It is that the dangerously elastic framing of what speech constitutes harm or hate has been deeply regressive in its impact on our cultural norms. There has been a sort of cultural mission creep which has especially undermined the resilience of new generations of young people. The language of hate speech legislation now trips off the tongues of sixth-formers in schools and university campus activists. When they complain that they disagree with or are made to feel uncomfortable by a speaker or a lecturer and say that they should be banned for their views, they will cite things straight out of the law such as, “That lecturer has caused me harassment, alarm and distress”. Where did they get that from? They will say that those words are perceived as harmful and that if they heard them, it would trigger anxiety—even claiming post-traumatic stress disorder is fashionable. It is because we have socialised the young into the world of believing that speech is a danger to their mental well-being, which has cultivated a grievance victimhood. It is a sort of circular firing squad, because the young, who feel frightened by words which they have picked up and been imbued with from the way the law operates, then demand even more lawfare to protect themselves and their feelings from further distress. They are even encouraged to go round taking screenshots of private messages, which they take to the police, or they scroll through the social media of people they do not like to see whether there is anything they can use in the law.

The law has enabled the emergence of a thin-skinned approach to speech, and this has been institutionalised via our statute book. The police do not seem immune to such interpretations of harmful words, either, and I am afraid that this can cause them to weaponise the power they have through this muddle. It wastes police resources and energy, an issue very pertinent to this Bill.

I will finish with an example. In August 2023, an autistic 16 year-old girl was arrested for reportedly telling a female police officer that she looked like her lesbian nana. The teenager’s mother explained that this was a literal observation, in that the police officer looked like her grandmother, who is a lesbian. The officer understood it as homophobic abuse, so a Section 5 public order offence kicked in on the basis of causing “alarm or distress” by using abusive language. If you witness the film of the incident, seven police officers entered the teenage girl’s home, where she was hiding in the closet, screaming in fear and punching herself in the face. You may ask who was distressed in that instance. The girl was held in custody for 20 hours and ultimately no charges were brought. But we must ask whether the statute book has created such confused laws and encouraged police overreach, and whether it encouraged that young police officer, who heard someone say the words “lesbian nana”, to immediately think, “arrest her, hold her for 20 hours and say that she is causing distress”. What has happened to the instincts of a police officer when they think that this would be the answer?

Many people to whom I speak about the problem addressed by this amendment suggest that it has been overstated. They say that, yes, the police are a bit too promiscuous in arresting people, but the numbers charged and convicted are fairly stable. In fact, a journalist recently told me that in some instances they are going down. But as legislators, should we not query whether this implies that the laws are giving too much leeway to the police to follow up malicious, trivial and politicised complaints? This creates the chilling consequence of the notion of process as punishment: you might not be charged, but you are arrested, and law-abiding citizens are humiliated and embarrassed with the cops at the door. We must take this amendment very seriously, and I hope that the Minister will give us a positive response.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, it is a delight to listen to the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, who hit the nail on the head: in fact, she hit many nails on the head, and I agree with everything she said.

I support Amendment 382F because it restores the proper boundary between criminal law and free expression. Criminal sanctions must be reserved for conduct that poses a real risk of harm, threats, menaces and conduct intended to intimidate, not for speech that merely offends or causes hurt feelings. Section 127 of the Communications Act and related provisions currently include abusive and insulting material, and even communication that causes “anxiety”—a formulation that has produced inconsistent enforcement and a chilling effect on legitimate debate.

Should I have reported my MS consultant when he told me the good news and the bad news? The good news was that he knew what it was, and the bad news was that it was MS. He wanted to check how spastic I was. That word, “spastic”, can sound like a terribly insulting term, but it was a medical reference to my condition. This morning, I got a text message reminder: “Your UCLH appointment with the spasticity walk-in clinic at Queen Square will take place early tomorrow morning”. We must make sure that we do not treat all words which may seem insulting as actually being so. The law should be precise and proportionate. Vague criminal offences that hinge on subjective reactions invite over-policing in online life and risk criminalising satire, political argument and robust journalism. Recent parliamentary analysis shows that arrests under communications offences have increased, while convictions have not kept pace, suggesting that resources are being spent on low-value prosecutions rather than on genuine threats to safety. Legal commentary also suggests the difficulties courts face in applying terms like “grossly offensive” and “insulting”, and that undermines predictability and fairness.

This amendment would not leave victims without recourse. Civil remedies, harassment injunctions, platform moderation and targeted civil criminal offences for stalking, doxing and credible threats remain available and should be strengthened. That combination protects vulnerable people while ensuring that criminal law is not used as a blunt instrument against free expression.

Of course, there are trade-offs. Decriminalising insults means some distress will no longer attract criminal penalties, but the correct response is not to expand criminal law; it is to improve support for civil remedies and focus policing on genuine threats. That approach better protects both free speech and personal safety.

For these reasons, I urge the Minister to support Amendment 382F in order to defend free expression, sharpen the law so that it targets real harm, and ensure that our criminal justice system focuses on threats that endanger people rather than on words that merely offend them.

--- Later in debate ---

Sadly, the woman in my case was not caught, mainly because no one moved until after she had gone. My concerns are that we need the full panoply of protection for vulnerable members of our community, who often experience much more than any of us can see or understand. This will also, by the way, assist the police in trying to do their difficult job. In practical terms, this means that the police must be able to record incidents that may not amount to a criminal offence, because in many cases it is the course of conduct—that is the phrase used in the business—that together amounts to harassment or other offences. If the police cannot do that, they would find it almost impossible to get enough evidence to charge someone with, for example, antisemitic or racially aggravated harassment, or even stalking. I really hope that the noble Lord is prepared to withdraw his amendment and that we can have a sensible debate about where some of the boundaries are with freedom of speech and damage to individuals.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

Before the noble Baroness finishes, I did not want to interrupt what I thought was a very helpful contribution that laid out the kind of dilemmas that we face, but I will just ask for a couple of points of clarification to see where we might agree or disagree. In relation to John Stuart Mill’s harm principle, does she recognise that the concept of harm has now become so broad—in terms of psychological harm, for example—that it has become possible to say that any speech is harmful, and that this has led to the mess that we are in? There is physical harm, as opposed to, “I think that speech is harmful”. Anytime I have been cancelled from speaking, it was on the basis that I would cause harm to the students or pupils. It is a concept of me turning up with a baseball bat, about to do some harm to them, whereas actually they were anticipating, ahead of me speaking on issues usually related to free speech, that I would harm them psychologically and they would be damaged. Is that not a problem for legislators in the context of this amendment? Secondly—

[Lord Katz (Lab)]

I remind the noble Baroness that while she is able to ask questions for clarification, interventions are meant to be brief and I urge some brevity, given the progress we have made in Committee so far this afternoon.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

I will ask this very briefly, then. Is there a problem that young people and the police do not appear to be able to distinguish between microaggressions and genocide? Is it one line?

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

I am very grateful to the noble Baroness for her intervention and her questions. I say, with great courtesy to the Government Whip, that her first question does not relate to the amendment because it is not about an offence. She was talking about the pre-banning of people and asking whether harm is so broad. However, that is a debate we need to have as society.

That leads into the noble Baroness’s second question about whether young people can distinguish. I think young people can distinguish. Part of the issue is that we as an older generation do not understand that a lot of them take a great deal of care about their colleagues because they have been brought up in a society with the rules, as opposed to having to introduce them, and they have seen exactly the concerns that I was raising. We need to continue to debate this but, bringing it back to this amendment, the point is that none of those issues is about offences.

--- Later in debate ---

[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.

[Baroness Hunt of Bethnal Green (CB)]

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.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

That was a very useful and nuanced contribution from the noble Baroness. She is absolutely right to notice the rise, for example, of antisemitic hate against Jews. The amount of hate crimes being recorded, however, has gone up hugely, despite the proliferation of hate crime legislation. Does that not rather imply that hate crime legislation is not stopping hate crime?

[Baroness Hunt of Bethnal Green (CB)]

I thank the noble Baroness for her intervention. It is a really important question, and I will try to remember to keep speaking in the third person, because I do want to just talk.

Has the proliferation of legislation helped prevent hate crime? During the past two decades we often saw increases, and we would question whether those increases were a product of increased hate crime, or an increased awareness of the legislation that led people to report. I am aware that, being of my generation, I am reluctant to report. There is a part of me that thinks, “You had it coming, and you should probably have taken your tie off for that walk down that street. You brought it on yourself”, added to which I do not want to waste police time. There is a conditioning that goes on with minority communities, and it takes some changing in how we think about these things to give communities permission to say that they did not have it coming, they do not deserve it, and that they have the right to talk to the police about those incidents.

I welcome the increase in reporting. Nevertheless, there has been an overreliance on using some of this legislation for incidents that should not constitute a hate crime. What happens when those cases are brought and those complaints are made, and how they are investigated, absolutely requires examination and thought. However, that does not justify the wholesale removal of hate crime legislation, which is a disproportionate response to the problem that has been identified.