Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Moynihan of Chelsea Excerpts

2nd reading
Thursday 16th October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moynihan of Chelsea (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, and I welcome the noble Baroness the Minister to her first Second Reading. I welcome elements of this new portmanteau Bill and the Minister’s assurances at the beginning of this debate of the focus being on fighting basic crime.

The Bill addresses legislation seen as obsolete, incomplete or needing amendments or improvement; I see a further golden opportunity in the Bill to remove hate crime law, which was first put on the books in 1965, addressing race hatred. Since then, hate crime law has proliferated—indeed, metastasised. It has proliferated in which protected characteristics it covers—now up to five in the UK, seven in Scotland; in the triviality that can now incur the police’s attention; in political agendas being pursued, with some hateful beliefs allowed to flourish but less politically modish views cracked down on; by uncoupling hate crime from actual crime, with police intimidating and harassing individuals for the absurd and near-oxymoronic concept of non-crime hate incidents; and in the many new organisations claiming to unearth hate crime and hate speech, funding false narratives of hate crime, dividing the nation further but with no reduction in hate crime. Hate crime has crystallised as the useful tool of left identitarians, dividing and conquering by inciting grievance within the identity groups whose votes they seek to capture.

Set against this is free speech. In this country, we traditionally do not believe in thought crime. Our first Queen Elizabeth famously said she had no desire to look into men’s souls, but now we have policemen saying, “I need to check your thinking”. Free speech advocates see the need to tolerate it when people say disgusting things we do not like. Only ordinary criminal law, not hate crime law, should be deployed in such circumstances, and only then if there is intent to incite imminent violence.

Criminalising hate speech did not prevent the hateful marches that occurred immediately after 7 October, before Israel could even react. Nor did it stop the continuation of those marches after the ceasefire had been achieved. In my view, those marches quickly, over the months, rose to the standard of criminal incitement after 7 October, yet nothing was done about that month after month. Is there any evidence that the invention of hate crime has reduced the number of attacks on minorities? Try asking Jews in Manchester that question, or Muslims in Bethnal Green.

Meanwhile, hate crime law has led to the police being confused, overstretched, badly led and distracted from fighting actual crime. Not one burglary was solved in 48% of English and Welsh neighbourhoods in the past three years. The police’s soft target now is to pursue the unthreatening middle-class tweeter rather than shoplifters, phone muggers, burglars or drug dealers. To redirect the police, we need to get hate crime off the statute book while ensuring that we have adequate provision within the criminal code for the punishment of any crime driven by the intent to intimidate, persecute or marginalise any group of citizens of whatever identity. Police could then focus on the numerous actual crimes that are committed daily so that our police forces can return, as they say, to policing our streets and not our tweets.