Journalism in the Dock

According to College of Policing guidance, Non-Crime Hate Incidents (NCHIs) help forces build an intelligence picture of community tensions and understand where they need to allocate resources for prevention. Indeed, during a House of Lords debate in November 2024, Lord Hanson, the Home Office minister, told peers: “It is vital that the police monitor non-crime hate incidents when proportionate and necessary to do so to help prevent serious crimes”. However, the Telegraph reports that freedom of information requests submitted to police by Harry Miller, the founder of Fair Cop, revealed that many of the biggest forces, including the Met, Greater Manchester and West Midlands do not actually analyse the NCHI data they collect. Meanwhile, the Conservatives are tabling an amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill to abolish non-crime hate incidents. FSU members can use our Campaigns tool to write to their MPs to urge them to vote for this amendment. In our next item, we discuss the barring of Renaud Camus, a French philosopher, from entering the UK due to his controversial views on immigration. Lord Young is quoted in the Telegraph, “We’ve reached out to him to see if he’d like any help in appealing this decision, and he said yes. So I anticipate that we are going to be getting an immigration lawyer on the case”. He adds, “I don’t think that the common good is endangered by inviting people to set out their contentious views in the public square, particularly not someone as distinguished as Mr Camus”. We end with a brief discussion on a new FSU briefing paper written by Trevor Kavanagh and entitled, “Journalism in the Dock, Sir Keir Starmer’s Baseless Prosecution of Tabloid Journalists as Director of Public Prosecutions”. The video of Monday’s FSU event, “Lifeblood of Democracy”, where we discussed the issues raised within the paper and Operation Elveden, will soon be available on our website. ‘That's Debatable!’ is edited by Jason Clift.