Police should stop wasting their time on non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs), Michael Gove has said.
The former Justice Secretary believes that police should “be pursuing burglars, shoplifters, and domestic abusers, not someone expressing an opinion”.
Mr Gove is the latest senior public figure to speak out against the police recording of NCHIs in the wake of Essex Police’s investigation into the award-winning Telegraph journalist and FSU member Allison Pearson for allegedly stirring up racial hatred in a tweet a year ago.
More than 13,200 NCHIs were recorded in the 12 months to June this year, according to statistics from 45 of Britain’s 48 police forces.
These have included a barber reported for being “aggressive and rough” because his Lithuanian customer spoke Russian; a nine-year-old who called a classmate a “retard”; and two secondary-school girls who said another pupil smelt “like fish”.
Speaking on a University of Law podcast, Mr Gove – now the editor of The Spectator – said: “I think the recent proliferation in the recording of non-crime hate incidents is deeply worrying. It literally is a waste of the police’s time to be arbitrating disputes on Twitter, or X. And to be investigating what people post online.”
“Most police forces,” he added, “are poorly led and poorly run.”
Mr Gove also indicated that he would not oppose the UK pulling out of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), saying that “many of those who make the case that we must stay in overstate their case. I believe it is perfectly possible for us to have a robust liberal democracy and not be in it. No one would suggest that Australia, New Zealand or Canada were illiberal jurisdictions and manifestly they’re not within the ECHR.”
