Hate Crimes and Two-Tier Justice

Why the British state refused to treat the grooming gangs as anti-white

The recent¹ decision by the Sentencing Council to make pre-sentence reports – which have been shown to reduce the likelihood of a custodial sentence – mandatory for ethnic minority offenders, while not for others, has understandably sparked outrage. Aimed at ‘addressing’ alleged disparities between the sentencing of ethnic minorities and whites, the new rules are two-tier by design. Sentencing Council chairman Lord Justice William Davis has admitted that “[w]hy this disparity exists remains unclear”, meaning there’s no reason to believe it’s down to unfairness. But for our equality-obsessed overlords, if a neutral system produces an unequal outcome, it is necessary to put a heavy thumb on the scales to try to ‘correct’ it. War is peace; inequality is equality.

Yet while the political heat the Sentencing Council is now facing is well earned, the fact remains that two-tier justice in Britain is really nothing new. Indeed, the UK has arguably had a two-tier sentencing regime in practice for more than a quarter of a decade, ever since the introduction into British law of the concept of ‘hate crime’.

Sections 29-32 of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 created aggravated versions of a range of offences, including assault, criminal damage, public order offences and harassment, where the crime was deemed to be motivated by “hostility, prejudice, or malice” towards someone on the basis of their membership of a racial or religious group. Three more identity categories have since been added: disability, sexual orientation and transgender identity. Offences found to be aggravated along any of these five dimensions carry significantly higher penalties: plain old murder, for instance, has a minimum term of 15 years – but make it racially aggravated and this increases to 30. Later Acts have extended the possibility of aggravation to every single crime.

Conceived in the wake of the murder of Stephen Lawrence, hate crimes formed part of a fervent Blairite moral and social crusade. In the words of the Labour Home Office minister who introduced the bill: “These crimes are particularly odious, damaging, as they do, not just the victim but the very fabric of the multi-racial society in which we live.” By making “significantly greater maximum penalties” available, the Act was to make an example of such offences, with judges required to state the aggravating factor in open court. In this way, explains Sussex Professor of Criminology Mark Walters, hate crimes “provide a strong symbolic message of denunciation, providing important social condemnation of prejudice-motivated behaviour”. A message is sent, with the aim to “create a society that more readily condemns racially or religiously motivated conduct”. In short, the new offence of hate crime was to function as a form of anti-racist social engineering.

By the letter of this law, an act can be considered a hate crime when committed by anyone or against anyone, white or black, straight or gay, Christian or Muslim. Being white or male, it is easily forgotten, are ‘protected characteristics’, too. In reality, though, hate crimes have always been at the very least “conceptualised as being offences committed by majority group members against marginalised minority group individuals”, says Walters. “Indeed,” he adds, “the main reason that hate crime legislation was introduced was… to protect these groups from racially motivated violence.”

We can see this one-eyed focus in the way hate crimes have always been talked about. In debates of the 1998 Crime and Disorder Bill, for instance, the bill is clearly understood by Parliamentarians to be about protecting “ethnic minorities” and to improve an alleged lack of confidence in the (hitherto largely colourblind) justice system.

Or consider how our myriad state-funded anti-racism NGOs approach the issue, like the Institute of Race Relations, a race charity which has long had the ear of government. In its website entry on hate crime we get a clear illustration of who is on its mind: “Every day on the streets of the UK, in playgrounds, classrooms, shops, at work, on public transport, black and minority ethnic people are racially harassed ” (my italics). Whether racial harassment against whites is assumed never to happen, or is simply deemed not to be worth mentioning, one is left to speculate. In the same vein, turning later to the statistics for religious hate crimes, we learn that in 2019-20: “Of the religious hate crimes, 50% were against Muslims and 19% against Jews.” Of the remaining 31%, some of which were presumably against Christians, we hear nothing. Some types of hate crime are to be talked about and campaigned on, we are given to understand; others are to be ignored, if they are even acknowledged to exist at all.

We can also see this double-standard in what becomes a cause célèbre in the media – and what doesn’t. More than three decades after it happened, there are surely few in Britain today who have not heard of the murder of Stephen Lawrence. The black teenager’s name has become a byword for racism in British society in general and the police in particular. This was despite uncertainty remaining as to whether it was a racist murder – while the violent gang had reportedly uttered racial slurs as they stabbed Lawrence at a bus stop, they had attacked whites in the past, too. Certainly, though, it was never proven that the police’s initial failure to secure a conviction reflected anything other than incompetence.

Yet after the 1999 MacPherson Report, itself effectively a show trial, the murder became the vehicle for a wholesale ideological revolution to combat the ‘institutional racism’ it said was lurking throughout Britain. The Lawrence case was to “serve as a watershed in our attitudes our attitudes to racism”, said then Home Secretary Jack Straw. “I want it to act as a catalyst for permanent and irrevocable change, not just across our public services but across the whole of society.” In this the media duly played their part, with countless documentaries and memorials of the murder and aftermath produced in the years since. It was shaped in the public consciousness into an original sin of racism, for which our enlightened institutions would now force the society at large to atone.

By contrast, how many have even heard of the heinous – and very definitely racially targeted – murder of Kriss Donald, a white Scottish 15 year-old, by a gang of five Pakistani men? In Glasgow in 2004, the teenager was kidnapped off the street, driven several hundred miles to Dundee and back, and then stabbed 13 times before being doused with petrol and set on fire. The gang had chosen Donald at random as a “white boy from the McCulloch Street area” in a revenge attack against a local white gang.

National media coverage of this horrific killing was shamefully threadbare. The entire case featured on national BBC news bulletins a total of only three times. The 2006 verdict – Scotland’s first conviction for racially aggravated murder – was not even reported by the Beeb. This on a day when the national broadcaster found time in its running order to cover the opening of a new arts centre in Gateshead. A police spokesman on race issues noted at the time that “it was harder to get the media interested where murder victims were young white men”. An FOI that year revealed that of the murders in the previous decade where the police considered race played a key role, nearly half of the victims had been white, the reaction was largely muted embarrassment. As far as I can tell, the only documentary ever made about Donald’s tragic case was a little-known 2021 true crime episode made by Channel 5. A Google Ngrams comparison reveals a peak search frequency for “Stephen Lawrence” more than 250 times higher than the brief peak for “Kriss Donald” in the years following his murder. Anti-white crimes, even the most shocking, are never allowed to cement themselves in the public mind, still less become a vehicle for policy change.

A burglary is a burglary; hate crimes, however, are generally pretty subjective. “Perception-based recording” is the loose standard required by the College of Policing, meaning an incident should be recorded as a hate crime, “where the victim, or any other person, perceives that they have been targeted because of hate or hostility”. (So-called Non-Crime Hate Incidents are also recorded to this “perception-based” standard, and it’s because of this absurdly capacious dragnet that an NCHI came to be recorded against a primary school pupil for using the word “retard”, among other lunacies.) With tackling ‘hate’ a key priority of the post-MacPherson police, there is enormous “pressure to keep finding, reporting and prosecuting real or imagined examples of hate crime”, notes sociologist Professor Peter Saunders, in a worthwhile 2011 study for Civitas. The upshot, Saunders explains, is that

the number of ‘hate crimes’ and ‘hate incidents’ has risen dramatically since they were first recognised in UK law. In 1998, when the Crime and Disorder Act created the category of “racially-aggravated offences”, 1,602 people were charged with racist crimes. By 2005, this had risen almost five-fold, to 7,430. In that year, it also became possible to commit a religiously-aggravated crime, so the total number of hate crimes that got prosecuted rose to 8,868. By 2009, this combined figure had increased to 11,624, but by then, sexuality, transgender and disability had been added to the list, so a further 1,406 people were prosecuted for homophobic or disability-related offences.

In the years since, that number has risen still further, with 14,047 hate crime defendants prosecuted by the CPS in the year to September 2024, of which 10,054 were racially aggravated.

Subjective and politicised – unlike plain old burglaries – whether alleged hate crime is treated as hate crime depends to a large degree on lobbying and activism. In turn, therefore, much rests on who gets to do the lobbying. Enter Hate Crime Scrutiny Panels, created in 2004. These are made up of representatives of ‘victim groups’ and operate across all 42 areas of the CPS, tasked with encouraging alleged ‘victims’ to bring complaints, along with the more general Community Involvement Panels. It’s an influential position for any such group to be in, empowered to mark the state’s homework as to whether it’s being sufficiently zealous about alleged crimes against its tribe.

So who is on them? Consider the composition of the CPS’s Pan-London and Hate Crime Scrutiny Panel, one major example.

Scanning down the list, we find that the Met is lobbied to pay attention to hate crime by groups purporting to speak for Jews (Community Security Trust and Shomrim), Muslims (Tell MAMA), black men, elderly Caribbeans, Hindus, old people, deaf and disabled people (Inclusion London), Somalis, Eastern Europeans, East Asians (Campaign Against Racism Group) and Sikhs (plus Multicultural Richmond, whose focus is “ethnic minority communities”, and the hate crime team of Tower Hamlets, a borough which, notes one writer in the Critic, “is under the full political control of an exclusively Bangladeshi-Islamic male-only political party”). Most of these of course receive significant state funding. Conspicuous by its absence is any group which claims to speak for white British people or for Christians (both also demographic minorities in London, lest we forget). The composition of other panels is less easy to come by (I have sent an FOI), but I’m willing to bet they look pretty similar.

To be clear, this isn’t to say, necessarily, that the solution would be to create a native British victim group as well and add it to the mix – far better, in my view, to scrap the whole ghastly edifice of ‘community policing’ and return to colourblind justice and English common law. Still, one must recognise how with this system, according to the asymmetrical logic of multiculturalism, the British state has institutionalised a blatant double standard.

So the intent of the law, the way it is commonly understood, and the way it is put into practice are all about punishing ‘hate crimes’ by the majority against the minority, and not the other way round. With such a two-tier system in place, it is no surprise that obvious hate crimes in the other direction go ignored and unprosecuted, all while trifling incidents of alleged racism by white people are prosecuted extremely harshly and with a hair trigger.

There are so many to choose from, but since we are talking about two-tier justice, it seems fitting to start with the notoriously controversial district judge Tan Ikram. In 2022, Ikram sent PC James Watts to prison for 20 weeks for racist memes mocking George Floyd that he had sent in a private WhatsApp. Crass though they may have been, these jokes were said in private – the idea that they would therefore merit prison time is simply extraordinary. But Ikram ruled that “the hostility that you demonstrated on the basis of race makes this offending so serious that I cannot deal with it by a community penalty or a fine”. “A message must go out,” he added – articulating, consciously or unconsciously, the acknowledged political aim of hate crimes since the beginning: punishing white British people for racist thoughts (even ones entertained as jokes). Further confirming the long shadow of MacPherson, he later suggested publicly that the reason he had handed down such a harsh sentence was to address alleged institutional racism in the police.

Or take Tory MP Bob Stewart, who in 2022 told a Bahraini activist who was heckling him in the street to “go back to Bahrain” and found himself convicted of a racially aggravated public order offence. While this was at least later overturned on appeal, this was only on the grounds that the activist, the Director of the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy who had come to Britain as a refugee, didn’t seem to have been caused sufficient distress by the ‘abusive’ comments – it would be hate crime if it had.

Meanwhile, last summer, former boxer Derek Heggie was held on remand for posting YouTube videos during the Southport unrest in which he made comments including the (factual) assertion that “young white girls are being raped by these grooming gangs that worship the Prophet Muhammad”. Heggie initially pleaded not guilty to posting racially aggravated comments online, but changed his mind in December after being held on remand for four months.

In today’s institutionally antiracist state, the mere suggestion of racial animus in something a white person has said – even if in private, even if true – will be treated as a significant aggravating factor by the authorities and can be used to send them to prison.

Yet when the boot is on the other foot, in the absence of any scrutiny from activists, racial animus against native British people is persistently and wilfully ignored. The most glaring example of prosecutors ignoring anti-white animus is of course in the decades-long outrage of the rape-gangs scandal. Indeed, in spite of the overwhelming evidence that racism against the ‘white slag’ victims by their predominantly Pakistani heritage abusers was playing a major role in these crimes, none of the rape-gang offences has ever been prosecuted as racially aggravated.

Again, one could point to any number of these cases, but consider the Rochdale rape gang sentenced in 2012, whose vile leader, Shabir Ahmed, notoriously shouted out in court: “We are the supreme race, not these white bastards.” The racial element of these crimes, need it be said, was clear as day. “All of you treated them as though they were worthless and beyond all respect,” said the judge, adding that “one of the factors that led to that was that they were not of your community or religion”. Yet police, prosecutors and politicians stubbornly insisted that race had not been a factor in the crimes. “I don’t think it’s a particular race or religion” said Labour MP Keith Vaz. “It’s totally wrong to say that it is.” The CPS declined to apply for racial aggravation, and some of the defendants got off shockingly lightly: one received just four years, another, five. Moreover, from the perspective of our enlightened social engineers, an opportunity was missed to highlight these unspeakable crimes as especially ‘odious’.

Yet this not just a historic problem confined to the grooming gangs. While the media have scarcely deigned to touch it, one grim feature of the unrest last summer was racial violence against whites. Perhaps in response to the narrative fomented by Keir Starmer that there were roving bands of far-Right thugs out on the streets, we saw the formation of sectarian Muslim mobs, organised supposedly in order to ‘protect local mosques’. In Middlesborough, Ameer Khalile was part of one such group which shouted “white racist scum” as they chased a man down the street, before he stamped on his victim’s head in a “vicious and violent” attack. The judge noted that the innocent victim, who, having been left face down in a ditch, could easily have drowned, was “probably attacked because he was white”. Yet while clearly meeting the definition, the offence was somehow not treated as racially aggravated by the CPS, and the thug received a paltry 34-month sentence for grievous bodily harm. (This violent, unprovoked attack merited only three months longer in prison than the sentence received by childminder Lucy Connolly, for a single ‘raging’ tweet on the night of the Southport attack.)

In Birmingham, meanwhile, another such mob, some of whom were armed with knives, tried to break into a family pub – that cultural bastion of Englishness – allegedly in search of the ‘far-Right’, a descriptor which is of course pretty exclusively applied to white people. Failing to batter down the barricaded doors of the Clumsy Swan, the group in masks and waving Palestine flags set upon the only white patron they could find still standing outside, Sean McDonagh, 51, who was left with a lacerated liver. When in October West Midlands Police finally got round to charging one man with violent disorder and assault, this indiscriminate attack by a Muslim mob against a white person was, surprise surprise, also not prosecuted as racially aggravated. The case, meanwhile, has been almost entirely forgotten, and it is not even clear that a trial date has been set. Can anyone seriously imagine that happening the other way round?

Lastly, one should also note that there is also a two-tier standard when it comes to religion, with alleged hate crime against Christians being treated far less seriously than that against Muslims or others, as Hardeep Singh has set out in the Critic. Though also woefully under-discussed, there are indeed anti-Christian attacks in Britain, like the man accused of tearing a cross off the roof of a Romford church in 2020, or the Pakistani Christian beaten up by Muslims in 2017 for selling poppies. Police data show there were over 4,000 crimes against churches in 2020-21, while Home Office figures for 2022-23 show 609 apparent hate crime offences against Christians. Yet despite this, notes Singh, “we see few (if any) politicians referring to ‘Christianophobia’, or anti-Christian hatred”. Indeed, there seems to be a clear double standard in how such attacks are reported. Nick Tolson, a former government faith adviser, tells Singh: “Crime against churches is often assumed to be normal crime unless proven otherwise whereas crime against other faith communities is considered hate crime unless proven otherwise.” In a grim insight into the reality of multicultural Britain’s ‘community of communities’ (read: angry competing tribes), Tolson notes that when it comes to hate-time security money, “it is often the [faith group] that shouts loudest that gets the Government funding”, rather than those that need it. With religious as with racial hate crime, whether incidents are taken seriously comes down to whether its victims are considered to be on the ‘marginalised’ side of the woke ledger.

Earlier this year, Professor David Starkey put it to me that “the moment you privilege any minority, the majority is disadvantaged”. His logic is undeniable: how could it be otherwise? As a result, “we now live in a country where you can be punished differently for the same action depending on the identity of your victim”, as Saunders observes. We have a category of crimes designed to cudgel the white majority into being less racist; in practice, when it comes to ethnic minorities, the force of that cudgel is rarely applied. How can this be anything other than two-tier justice?

1. This essay was originally published in the Daily Sceptic on 29 March, 2025

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