Hating on the Hate Speech proposals

By: Frances

02 August 2021

It looks as though Labour have taken a hit due to their unintelligible Hate Speech proposals. The admittedly volatile Roy Morgan poll released yesterday has Labour down almost 10% to 43% – below the threshold that sees it governing alone. And, naturally ACT have done very well out of the whole mess, rising roughly 4% to sit at 11%. No other party did better than a 2% increase – but Labour is the only Party to drop.

The proposals basically do two things: make people feel better after the horror of a genuine hate crime (the March 15, 2019 killings in Christchurch, which these proposals would have done nothing to prevent) by suggesting that religion becomes a protected category, and demonstrate further to the insatiable gender lobby that Labour really, really has its back and will do its bidding, however insane.

Q+A Sunday morning featured Jack Tame and lawyer Steven Price glumly mulling over the prospects for the law, with neither seeming convinced that they’re needed or will be any more effective than the current laws. Price made the point that in some jurisdictions, such laws have been used against the very minorities Labour is so desperate to curry favour with – gay people, and Imams for example.

Jack Tame was brave enough to ask Price if someone tweeting “trans women aren’t women” might reach the threshold  – and Price was honest enough to acknowledge that “the trans issue is complicated” – but he still couldn’t answer.

In the panel discussion following the interview we were treated to the unlovely spectacle of former Labour MP Sue Moroney telling everyone that if we aren’t sure if something we are going to say might breach the new laws, there’s a simple solution – just don’t say, or tweet it! Moroney seemed chuffed at how clever that obviously was, and followed up by cheerily reminding us, that it doesn’t matter if Labour have No Fucking Idea how the laws will work – because that’s what case law is for! No doubt viewers were greatly reassured by this.

Also surprising was that Tame, Price and Hooton sidekick Ben Thomas all seemed to think the fact there have been almost no prosecutions under the current law were a sign that another, more punitive law was needed – despite Price acknowledging the proposals won’t make it much easier, and may in fact make it harder to bring a prosecution. It didn’t occur to any of them that perhaps that’s a good sign – that our country is more harmonious than the moral panic-mongers of the Labour Party would have us believe.

There’s certainly nothing in the proposals to give women any confidence that things will change for us. We’re not mentioned! It’s not clear that sex will be a category specifically protected from hate speech, while at the same time, Proposal 6 insidiously seeks to insert extra definitions into the ground of sex in the HRA – including ‘sex characteristics’, but without any explanation of what this means – why protect ‘sex characteristics’ separately from sex? And what happens when the new protected category of gender identity comes up against the existing protected category of sex? Whose rights prevail? And, OF COURSE there’s no discussion whatsoever about making violent and degrading pornography a hate crime – though it seems likely it incites men and, increasingly, boys to commit degrading and hateful acts upon women and girls. Grace Millane’s killer watched pornography, including shortly after killing her. There’s a case to answer there, but this Government just doesn’t care about women.

It’s incredible that the Government is happy to waste so much political capital on laws for which no cogent case has been made. And there’s something disturbing about how much supposed leftists want to lock people up for saying things, to send fear into the hearts of us all, supposedly for the sake of making us better people in a better country.

If the Hate Speech mess has brought about a 10% drop in support for Labour, what will the draconian proposals in the Conversion Therapy Ban law and the utterly nutty contortions in the BDMRR Bill bring?  This Government can’t stay hugely popular forever. It’s just baffling why it’s prepared to waste its piggy-bank, chock-full of political coin, on these bonkers identitarian proposals, when Fair Pay Agreements are still nowhere to be seen, and wealth taxes have been comprehensively ruled out, effectively for another generation. Some of us had high hopes for real economic transformation with this government, but they’re fading fast, arguably, along with our freedom.

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