Law Commission Hate Crime Report

The Law Commission's report on amending English and Welsh Hate Crime laws is out. At a humongous 556 pages there's no way I'm doing more than dipping into it!

The headline measure is bring disability, homophobic and transphobic hate crime into line with race/religious hate crime so that all the protected characteristics have the same protections as each other - the previous situation being that incitement and aggravated crimes only existed for race and religion based hate. And that's good.

Unfortunately everything else seems bad. I noticed in passing that gender critical views are to get explicit freedom of speech protections, and even deliberate misgendering and dead-naming will have to reach the level of harassment before they're covered. I suspect there's other trans stuff I'm not familiar enough with to recognize.

But I was mostly looking for the disability side of things and despite the Law Commission backing making denying someone's disability a hate crime in their interim report they've been talked out of it by various non-disabled groups. They acknowledge it's a serious problem, the CPS and the Law Society back it becoming a hate crime, and it's possibly the change most wanted by disabled people, but they've been talked out of it by non-disabled groups like the Welsh Government, the Government Independent Hate Crime Adviser, and British Transport Police. One of the comments they take at face value is clearly an abled 'ally' concerned that outlawing denying someone's disability will limit their self-assigned mission to police which of us look disabled enough to access disabled parking.

Grrr.

The report can be found here