Diolch yn fawr, Llywydd. I’m very pleased to have this opportunity to introduce an important short debate. In 14 years in the House of Commons, I never took advantage of the opportunity to have an adjournment debate at the end of the day, but they tended to be perhaps rather later in the day than short debates take place in the more enlightened atmosphere of the National Assembly.

We hear very frequently that we have an explosion of hate crime, particularly by those who want to associate this with Brexit, and the purpose of my debate today is to question that and to provide a factual background to this important debate. It is true that police forces around the country have recorded significant increases in hate crimes. Only four, in fact, in the three months after the referendum last year, recorded a decrease in hate crimes, and in the case of many police forces, there were very significant increases in the number of incidents that were reported as hate crimes, and this has been held up as evidence that prejudice and a form of madness and mania, in fact, were unleashed by the Brexit process. I think this is much more likely to be a reflection of the fact that there’s been an active trawling for evidence of hate post Brexit, and you will find it if you want it. The websites in particular that encourage people to report things as hate crime very often have political motivations behind them.

Also, the other important factor is that in fact almost anything can be recorded today as a hate crime, even if there’s no evidence for it, and I think this is the most important realisation here. What we’re doing is in fact witnessing the invention of a crime epidemic as a kind of cynical manipulation, fundamentally for political or other reasons. I think the example of what happened to Amber Rudd, the Home Secretary, last year is a very good reflection of this. She made a speech at the Conservative party conference that was about foreign workers and this was reported to the police as a hate crime, a hate incident, by a professor at Oxford University, Professor Joshua Silver. He made the complaint because he took issue with what he described as the Home Secretary’s discrimination against workers from overseas, because he said that she had called upon employers to keep lists of foreign workers. It proved to be the case subsequently that he hadn’t actually heard the speech at all. He was merely going on newspaper reports of the reaction to the speech, and, if you read the speech, of course, you’ll see that Amber Rudd didn’t in fact call for employers to keep any lists at all. So, the whole incident was misconceived, but that was reported as a non-crime incident, and that is now one of the statistics supposedly of this upsurge in race hate incidents.

So, there is in fact a disparity between what’s actually happening in Britain today and the way that it is perceived as a result of this particular incident. In fact, in my lifetime, there’s been a very significant reduction in race and other forms of prejudice that has come about partly, perhaps, from the anti-discrimination legislation, but also from society becoming in many ways more cosmopolitan, and, in the world of mass communications, we’re now much more aware of the rest of the world than we were back in the 1950s. I think, therefore, that the climate in which we all live is much less conducive to prejudice today than it used to be. In fact, in recent years, parties like the BNP have completely disappeared. Even the English Defence League, which makes a lot of noise, is hardly to be seen anywhere in the country today. And that’s a very good thing, too.

Compare Britain with what’s happening in France, where you get incidents of people burning down mosques—I mean, that’s a real hate crime. But, in this country, actually somebody shouting something nasty on the bus is what most of these incidents that are recorded as hate crimes are all about. The fact that more than 1 million Londoners voted for Sadiq Khan to become the mayor in London last year, giving him the largest direct mandate enjoyed by any individual in British history, is perhaps another illustration of that.

And, of course, nobody should downplay the hurt caused to those who are attacked and abused. I don’t expect sympathy from anybody, but I have frequently been on the receiving end of a huge amount of abuse in the course of my life, and, I have to say, even inside this institution, which I won’t dwell on today, but it is a fact. But the number of hate crimes that have been recorded by the police has grown year by year. Six years ago there were 42,255. The latest figure I’ve got here is 2014-15—there were 52,528. So, that’s a significant increase, 20 per cent. It’s probably a much bigger number today than it was two years ago. But you need to take these figures with a pinch of salt, in my view. It’s a product of the authorities, in fact, redefining racism and prejudice to such an extent that almost any unpleasant encounter between people of different backgrounds can today be recorded as hatred.

In the aftermath of Brexit, the police said that 14,000 hate crimes were recorded between July and September 2016. But many of these incidents are likely to have been reported through a website funded by the police called True Vision, which allows anybody anywhere to report anything they like, whether they’ve experienced it or not, and, indeed, to do so anonymously. So, these statistics are not worth the paper that they are printed on. You need no evidence to justify a complaint, everything is instantly logged as a hate incident without any question at all, and this inevitably presents a warped view of reality. Indeed, the idea of hate crime itself is entirely subjective, because the police and the Crown Prosecution Service agreed a common definition of hate crime 10 years ago to measure hate crime levels, and hate crime, the police say, is:

Any criminal offence which is perceived, by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice towards somebody based on a personal characteristic.’

So, it is explicitly subjective, whether this is a reasonable belief or not. The police’s hate crime operational guidance stresses that the victim’s perception is the deciding factor in whether something is measured as a hate crime or not—absolutely no evidence is required. I’ll read the paragraph from the police operational guidance on hate crime to prove the point, paragraph 1.2.3:

For recording purposes, the perception of the victim, or any other person…is the defining factor in determining whether an incident is a hate incident, or in recognising the hostility element of a hate crime. The victim does not have to justify or provide evidence of their belief, and police officers or staff should not directly challenge this perception. Evidence of the hostility is not required for an incident or crime to be recorded as a hate crime or hate incident.’

What sort of a world are we living in where something that isn’t required to be proved is regarded as having been proved, and where no inquiries are made as to the reasonableness of what is reported? That is inevitably going to skew statistics. You don’t actually need to prove a hate crime, just a feeling, because hostility is justified, for these purposes, in dictionary definition terms.

So, apparent lack of motivation as the cause of an incident is not relevant according to the police, as it is the perception of the victim or any other person who counts, as in the case of Professor Silver—he wasn’t actually present at Amber Rudd’s speech, he hadn’t even seen it on television, and yet he reported it as a hate incident.

Now, if we look at the Home Office statistical bulletin that measures these things then you will see that not only do you not have to have a reasonable belief that what happened to you, if it did happen at all, was motivated by some form of hatred within the categories that are listed in the legislation, it can also be that cancelled records are recorded as hate crimes—and, again, I’m quoting from an official document from the Home Office, ‘Hate Crime in England and Wales 2015 to 2016’, statistical bulletin 11/16—because:

A transferred or cancelled record occurs when the police record an offence, but subsequently determine that the crime did not take place, was recorded in error or should be transferred to another force.’

So, cases where an incident has been reported, but the police subsequently discover that there was no such incident or crime, are still reported and retained in the statistics as evidence of hate crime. This is the ‘Alice in Wonderland’ world into which we have now wandered. It’s a kind of unhinged subjectivity, which clearly provides those with political axes to grind with a motivation, and the mechanism to carry it out, for making complaints for political reasons.

Now, not only is there such a thing as hatred and victimisation of the kind that I’ve outlined, but there is also something called secondary victimisation, which I wasn’t aware of until I looked into this a little more closely. Again, I quote from the Home Office operational guidance on hate crime:

This is a term used to describe situations where a victim suffers further harm because of insensitive or abusive treatment from those who should be supporting them, for example, feeling they have experienced indifference or rejection from the police’.

So, if the police are, in the opinion of the person who makes the complaint, indifferent towards it—and that indifference may be caused by the fact that the complaint itself is not credible—then that in itself is also reported now as a hate incident or a hate crime. So, we’re piling Ossa upon Pelion here, and we are compounding an error, which is going to lead us down the wrong alley if we are making policy on the basis of such statistics. So, it’s the sanctification of perception over what actually happened that has trickled down into these crime and incident recording statistics that I believe underlies the misconception about the extent to which there is real hate crime in this country. Of course, there are real incidents of hate, we know that, and they’re all to be deplored and the full weight of the law should be used in order to discourage such conduct. But if we allow the kind of myths that I’ve described and the mechanism by which they’ve come into existence to be perpetuated then this will discredit the law in respect of the areas of misconduct where we really do need to concentrate. And it’s also a massive misuse and waste of police time as well. So, there’s a great deal that requires explanation that lies behind these headline statistics.

We all know that in the age of box ticking and targets, the police are very anxious to record as much as possible of this nonsense as incidents and targets, because they are fulfilling their own objectives and they get paid for doing this. So, there is, in terms of police budgets, a reward for recording something that is actually not true. And not only that, of course: it then creates a kind of political panic about hate crime, which gives others in other parts of public administration a sense of purpose, and a search for and an exaggeration of hatred that I believe to be profoundly dangerous, and it is an abuse, actually, of process that should concern us all.

So, yes, we should deprecate any form of verbal abuse and, even more so, of course, physical violence. But what we shouldn’t do is to victimise people who are innocent of any real crime or other form of stigma. And I believe that the huge misallocation of resources that now underlies this epidemic of misreporting actually detracts from the real task of those whose main duty is to enforce the law. So, I’ve called this little debate today merely to break the consensus of silence that has surrounded this particular issue, and, because I have been accused of standing in UKIP on a platform of hatred by a Member of this Assembly, and I’ve had other similar imprecations hurled at me, this is why I have called the debate today, and I’m profoundly grateful to you, Llywydd, for selecting it for debate.