The stirring up racial hatred offence, first created in the Race Relations Act 1965, is very, very serious. It carries a potential penalty of up to seven years in prison. It is also disturbingly vague: what does “stirring up” actually mean? Who gets to define “hatred”? Unlike American speech laws around incitement to violence, speech doesn’t have to be “likely” to stir up violence to count as criminal, but merely “intended” – meaning it strays into policing thought crime. To safeguard free speech, any such charge requires the consent of the Attorney General to proceed.
Once, it was used sparingly and for relatively extreme cases. Among the first convictions, in 1967, was the leader of the British National Socialist Movement, Colin Jordan.
But as our justice system gets more politicised and the state grows more censorious, arrests and prosecutions under this once-rare offence have expanded massively. Just one person was convicted of the offence in 2015, compared with 44 last year.
Last year, Essex Police used this offence to go after the Telegraph’s Allison Pearson over a tweet in which she criticised two-tier policing, before the force shamefacedly dropped the charges after a major public outcry. And as even the White House now knows, childminder Lucy Connolly received a 31-month prison sentence for stirring up racial hatred over a single, hastily deleted tweet on the night of the Southport massacre....<<<Read More>>>...
