This article is taken from the November 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
I thought the Free Speech Union had won the war against non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs) in 2023 when the home secretary, Suella Braverman, brought forward secondary legislation limiting the circumstances in which they could be recorded.
We had lobbied hard to enable her to lay this statutory instrument, and on the face of it, it looked like a huge win. The new Code of Practice said police should only record an NCHI where the behaviour in question is clearly motivated by intentional hostility, where there is real risk of significant harm and a tangible likelihood that a crime will be committed in future. Victory!
We got an inkling that our celebrations were premature when there was no reduction in the number of people asking us for help because they’d had an NCHI recorded against them. That’s no small thing, because it can show up in a job application if you have to do an enhanced DBS check. That is to say, if you apply for a job as a teacher, you can be rejected because you’ve committed a “non-crime”.
About 18 months after the new regime had been put in place, we submitted Freedom of Information requests to all the police forces in England and Wales to find out how many NCHIs they’d recorded in the year following the roll-out of the new guidelines compared to the previous year.
To our astonishment, police recorded more NCHIs in 2023-24 than the previous year. Thirty of England and Wales’s 43 forces responded, revealing that they’d recorded 11,690 in the year to June 2024, up 0.4 per cent from the 11,642 in 2022-23.
We realised legislation wouldn’t be enough to rein in the police. They have “operational independence”, after all. If they wanted to continue spending 60,000 hours every year investigating and recording NCHIs — Policy Exchange’s estimate — then they bloody well would. If we were going to win this war, we needed chief constables onside.
That is now beginning to happen, though only partly thanks to us. It’s mainly due to public outrage over a series of high-profile arrests following reports of “hate incidents”.
I’m thinking of the arrest of Julian Foulkes, a former special constable in Kent, for defending Israel in an online spat with a pro-Palestinian activist. His home was raided by six police officers, one of whom looked askance at all the “Brexity books” on his shelves.
The Met said that NCHIs would still be recorded for ‘intelligence’ purposes
He was detained for 12 hours before being given a caution. The FSU weighed in and managed to extract an apology from the Kent chief constable as well as £20,000 in compensation.
But this is only the tip of the iceberg. The Times discovered that over 12,000 people a year are being arrested for “offensive” social media posts, an average of more than 30 a day.
In almost every case, the police are following up reports of online “hate incidents” which they feel bound to investigate, even though — according to The Times — less than five per cent lead to prosecutions. No matter. The police can log the remainder as NCHIs.
The straw that broke the camel’s back was the arrest of the comedy writer Graham Linehan by five armed police officers in September. They were investigating a complaint by a trans-identifying man about three tweets ridiculing trans rights activists. Poor Graham was held in a cell for 16 hours and only released when his blood pressure became so high he had to be taken to A&E.
The FSU pulled together a top team of lawyers to represent him and they gradually wore down the Metropolitan Police, first getting the onerous bail conditions lifted, then forcing them to accept there was no case to answer.
We were toasting that victory at FSU towers when news came in of an unexpected bonus: the Met announced they’d decided to stop investigating NCHIs altogether. Hallelujah! Graham Linehan, with a little help from the FSU, had been able to achieve what parliament hadn’t.
Or had he? The Met press office was careful to say that NCHIs would still be recorded for “intelligence” purposes — although that begs the question of what possible “intelligence” value they will have if they aren’t investigated?
My view is that the police are welcome to continue recording them provided no one is arrested — or asked to attend a voluntary interview — and provided they don’t show up in an enhanced DBS check. Yes, it’s a colossal waste of police time, but at least they’ll no longer have a chilling effect on free speech.
Let’s be realistic, the police telling an irritating complainant that they’ll be recording the complaint as an NCHI will just be a way of getting them off the phone. I imagine they’ll be logged on some dust-gathering database that exists solely for that purpose.
This is El-Alamein, not D-Day. But it feels like a turning point. I predict NCHIs will be gone, other than as a sop to nuisance callers, within a year.
Yuan Yi Zhu is away.
