UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer appears to have no problem throwing the police under the bus, in a bid to extricate himself and his cabinet from a controversy over “non-crime hate incidents” (NCHIs) reporting.
The row, which is refusing to die down, was sparked by Telegraph journalist Allison Pearson becoming a subject of police interest for a message posted on X a year ago, that is suspected to be a hate crime (allegedly, incitement to racial hatred).
Amid the backlash, Starmer told the newspaper, “I think that, as a general principle, the police should concentrate on what matters most to their communities. This is a matter for the police themselves, police force by police force, so they can make their decisions and will obviously be held to account for those decisions.”
This statement came despite the prime minister previously personally supporting a number of online speech-restrictive moves, as his government approved the removal of restrictions placed on NCHIs – with the number of these complaints rising.
If Starmer’s intent had been to do some “crisis management” it doesn’t seem to have worked: “forked tongue hypocrisy” is how the deputy leader of Reform UK, Richard Tice, reacted to the PM’s comments.
Tice at the same time repeated what many critics of NCHIs continue to warn about, namely, that a large number of trivial complaints are being looked at by the police, drawing their resources away from investigating violent crimes and towards doing “woke tweet policing.”
Another point that opponents keep making is that the current UK cabinet, which took over earlier in the year, has been working to ensure more NCHIs get recorded, allegedly as a method of suppressing free speech.
Among those raising their voices against the practice after the affair targeting Pearson came to light are opposition MPs, such as the shadow home secretary, Chris Philp. According to him, the police use hate crime laws “wrongly 90 percent of the time.”
The way these rules spurring the police to react should be used is “extremely rarely” – when there is reason to suspect, from somebody’s speech, that they are likely to imminently commit a hate-driven crime.
Even former heads of MI6 and the Metropolitan Police, Sir Richard Dearlove and Lord John Stevens, have spoken against what they call “a waste of (police)” resources, that should instead be used to deal with violent crime.
