Research by the Free Speech Union suggests little public appetite for new Hate Crime Bill in Northern Ireland

General Secretary Toby Young appeared on BBC Radio Ulster’s?The Nolan Show?to discuss the results of an?opinion poll?commissioned by the Free Speech Union. As reported by the?Belfast Newsletter, the poll revealed little public appetite in Northern Ireland for a Hate Crime Bill and considerable anxiety that it would have a chilling effect on free speech.

Back in 2019, the Northern Irish Justice Department commissioned Judge Desmond Marrinan to carry out a review of hate crime legislation. Following publication of the Marrinan Review in December 2020, the Department immediately accepted 22 of his 34 recommendations, including those that would: bring forward a Hate Crime and Public Order (Northern Ireland) Bill, apply a statutory aggravation model to all criminal offences, whereby any offence motivated by hostility towards protected groups is punished more severely; include transgender identity as a protected characteristic; frame legislation to allow more groups to be added to the ‘protected’ list in future; extend the ‘stirring up hatred’ offence so it applied to all the groups on the ‘protected’ list; and implement the proposals in the UK Government’s 2019 Online Harms White Paper to prohibit online content that is ‘legal but harmful’. As we point out in our latest briefing paper (here), the Marrinan proposals appear to have been heavily influenced by Scotland’s Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act – a piece of legislation that Free Speech Union Scottish Advisory Council member Jamie Gillies recently referred to as an “authoritarian mess” (Spiked).

Phase one of a public consultation designed to inform the development of a new Hate Crime Bill closed earlier this year, with phase two issuing in due course. As Toby pointed out on?The Nolan Show, one of the things the Free Speech Union poll did was confirm the existence in Northern Ireland of a ‘demographic divergence’ that first became apparent in the consultation exercise. Whereas activists and campaigners tend to support the idea of legislating against ‘hate speech’ to make society more ‘inclusive’ and ‘respectful’, individual members of the public – in both the consultation exercise and our polling data – tend to express concern about the impact of such legislation on freedom of speech and expression.

Remarkably, the Department dealt with this ‘divergence’ by consistently adopting recommendations opposed by the public and endorsed by activists. “So what was the point of running a consultation process?” a perplexed interviewer asked Toby at one point. “So they can say that they consulted about it,” he replied, rounding off an interactional exchange that would surely have graced any episode of the BBC's 1980s political satire,?Yes Minister.

Worryingly, phase two of the consultation looks set to consider what Toby went on to describe as “even more draconian and illiberal” recommendations. “There is”, he explained, “currently an exception within the Public Order Act whereby you cannot be prosecuted for stirring up hatred against a member of a protected group in the privacy of your own home. One proposal in phase two is to scrap that defence, so that if you say something supposedly hateful to your child at the dinner table, you could be prosecuted and your child summoned as a witness in a court as part of the prosecution.” Another proposal is to make “transmisogyny” a hate crime, such that if someone were to say that they didn’t think transwomen should compete against women in women’s sport, “they might then be liable for prosecution on account of having committed a transmisogynistic hate crime”.

The concern now is that this final phase of the consultation will follow a similar pattern to phase one, with the public expressing concerns about the proposals, activist groups cheerily endorsing them as useful tools for the persecution of their opponents, and the Department then siding with the activists.

It’s worth noting that the Marrinan Review was commissioned, and its proposals accepted, by officials within Northern Ireland’s Justice Department when Northern Ireland didn’t have a Government. There was no Government in Northern Ireland between 2017 and 2020 and there hasn’t been one since February of this year, when First Minister Paul Givan resigned. How can it be democratic for unelected bureaucrats to make such sweeping changes to the law?