Why we should scrap hate-crime laws

The Law Commission has published a 550-page report detailing its recommendations on reforming hate-crime laws. Among a raft of proposals, it recommends expanding the category of hate crime to include prejudice against disabled and LGBT+ people – although not, controversially, prejudice against women.

With so many competing to have their identities legally recognised and protected against ‘hate’, it is hard to please everyone. So it is unsurprising that reactions to the report have been mixed.

Stonewall, for instance, has celebrated the proposals to include ‘asexual’ in the definition of sexual orientation, and to expand ‘transgender identity’ to ‘transgender or gender-diverse identity’ – which includes ‘people who are transgender or transsexual men or women’, ‘gender diverse’, ‘non-binary’, or ‘who otherwise do not conform with male or female gender expectations’. Stonewall claimed that this would be ‘a huge leap forward for the safety of LGBTQ+ people’.

[…]  These arguments and the competition over what to classify as a hate crime are revealing. They testify to the absurdity of using ‘hate’ as a legal category in the first place. Think about it for a second. The idea that someone who attacks a trans person should get a longer sentence than someone who attacks a woman (or a sex worker), because one is classified as a hate crime and one isn’t, makes little sense. Is one attack worse than the other? Is one attack more hateful than the other? And why should one prejudice be deemed a ‘hate crime’ and one not? The Law Commission even admitted that it had received ‘many personal responses’ advocating for ‘the repeal of hate-crime laws’, but said that this was ‘not within the remit of this review’ to consider.

More worrying still is the flippant way in which the report discusses drawing up new laws.

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