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March 1 2025 - 1:00pm
“Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman.” Such was the suggestion of historian A.J.P. Taylor, at the beginning of his English History 1914-45. Whether you find such a vision attractive or not depends on your wider political views. Taylor himself could hardly have intended it as a straightforward hymn of praise to light-touch government, given his lifelong socialist views.
Regardless, that conception of the role of government was dead and buried long ago. It is, though, the vital context for understanding the news that the Labor government is apparently working to ensure that non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs) continue to be recorded, albeit under a different name. NCHIs were strongly criticized by the Court of Appeal in a 2021 ruling as having a potential “chilling effect” on free speech. They have been the target of much criticism and negative campaigning. Getting rid of them entirely would be straightforward, an easy win for Labor, and yet the party refuses to do so, despite the Prime Minister’s promise last year of “a politics that treads a little lighter on all of our lives”.
For Labor, there is no real contradiction here; it would argue that in a highly diverse society, controlling “hate speech” or “misinformation” is part of keeping the peace, and so protects citizens in a more indirect way. This is why many Left-wing people struggle to understand objections to diversity training, or to the VAT raid on private schools: equality is crucial to a healthy society, so any sacrifices are worth it. It explains the seemingly vindictive sentencing of people who made unwise comments on social media during last summer’s riots. The extraordinary recent criticism of Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch by the Lady Chief Justice for daring to debate judicial rulings also reflects the modern state’s wariness of robustly expressed opinion.
Of course, the ultimate logic of this way of thinking is endless interference in people’s personal interactions and political opinions, because unjust social relations – or at least what modern progressives regard as unjust social relations — are the near-inevitable outcome of a genuinely free society. Once upon a time, civil liberties campaigners trained their on the state’s restrictions on the individual, which were relatively simple to remove. Now those battles are won, and attention has turned to supposed injustices arising from the attitudes and beliefs of private citizens and private institutions — sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. Given their vague and almost infinitely elastic definitions, abolishing these supposed injustices requires the state to tread very heavily indeed on all our lives.
This is the paradox of a permissive and multicultural society: how do you manage the people who don’t want to be permissive and multicultural? How do you restrain the power of the state when your own ideology legitimizes, in principle, almost endless interference in the day-to-day interactions of ordinary people? Non-crime hate incidents are the logical conclusion of this ideology; it continued unchecked under successive Conservative governments, and it’s going nowhere under this one.
