Hate speech Bill is dangerously vague

Sir, – In his interesting piece on the proposed hate crimes legislation, Joe Humphreys goes too far when he says that “a constitutional challenge [to the legislation] would almost certainly fail” (“How did the hate speech Bill find itself at the centre of a swirling culture war?”, Opinion & Analysis, August 7th). This is far from certain.

While he is correct to say that Article 40 of the Constitution “significantly limits” freedom of expression, such limits can only be imposed on the grounds of “public order”, meaning at the very minimum to prevent breaches of the peace or the incitement of violence. Under the Bill, any utterances, no matter how mild, which are deemed to incite “hatred” (a term which is undefined in the Bill) amount to an offence. There is a question as to whether this meets the threshold, and indeed the constitutionality of the existing Prohibition of Incitement to Hatred Act 1989 has been widely questioned on this basis but has never been tested due to the low number of prosecutions taken under that Act.

Second, the Bill also appears to offend the constitutional requirement that criminal statutes must be clear and precise. For example, the Bill defines the protected characteristic of “gender” as “the gender of a person or the gender which a person expresses as the person’s preferred gender or with which the person identifies and includes transgender and a gender other than those of male and female”.

Far from being clear and precise, this laughable word salad essentially means that gender is an open-ended and entirely subjective matter. In plain English, an alleged victim of a hate crime could choose from a virtually limitless list of genders and claim that virtually any speech amounted to “hate speech” directed at them on that basis. How is a person to guard themselves against such an accusation, in a world where the mildest dissent on this issue provokes allegations of hatred?