Crime and Policing Bill

Debate between Baroness Fox of Buckley and Baroness Hunt of Bethnal Green

Committee stage
Thursday 15th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[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.