It’s really great to be able to speak in such an important debate today. I do welcome the annual report on equalities and I want to actually focus specifically on objective 4, which is hate crime. I’m doing that because we are living in a time where that is growing, and hate crime across the protected characteristics of race, religion, disability, sexual orientation and gender identity is really what we’re talking about. I’m not going to rehearse what Hannah Blythyn has said about the under-reporting; she is absolutely right that there is evidence that, of the high number that we have, it is the case that, most often, hate crime is not reported for whatever reason that might be. But there is a statistic that says 79 per cent of those incidents that are reported are race-related hate crimes, and they have really substantive impacts on both the victims and the victims’ families. They are both physical and also psychological, and that, again, was reported by the all-Wales hate crime research project earlier this year.

It is really important that, when we are debating this today, we actually do think about the impact of hate crime as being an impact on an individual and an impact on their family, rather than just reeling off statistics. That is why the Welsh Government’s ‘Tackling Hate Crimes and Incidents: A Framework for Action’ is important, because it does aim to tackle hate crime across all the protected characteristics. It is the case, I’m pleased to see, that age has now been added, because there are, recently, reports that people are being discriminated against purely because of their age, whatever that age might be. So, we have reports of elderly people being discriminated against purely because they’re elderly people, but we are also now getting reports of young people being discriminated against because they are young people.

But there is a characteristic that I would ask you to add to that, Cabinet Secretary, and that is gender. I think, if we could add gender as a protected characteristic, we would capture an awful lot of the hate crime that has been discussed here today. By ‘gender’, we have to look at gender in all its meanings, not just being a woman—very often, if you say the word ‘gender’, people immediately think you are just talking about women. So, I would like, really, very much, to see that as an added characteristic.

There is support that is available by the hate crimes support centre, and there’s £488,000 of Welsh Government funding that has been put in as part of that framework to tackle hate crime, and I very much welcome that. I know that the centre has aimed to help 2,000 victims over the last three years. You know, again, if we think of these as not victims, but as individuals and families around them, that is a significant level of support.

But we can’t get away from the fact that, in some cases, people are subject to hate crime because of the conversation that happens in places like this. And if I have one appeal today to all of us, it is to be extremely mindful of the language that we use, because we’ve all seen what happens when the language that we use somehow gets out of control, and gets fed back into the communities that then think it’s okay to use in those communities. Trump, in my opinion, has taken that to the extreme, but, nonetheless, the fact that hate crime has gone up during the last year, in my opinion, needs close examination and close scrutiny to see if that is being aligned, in any way, to the language that we’ve seen used in the Brexit debate last year.