Talk:Hate speech laws in the United Kingdom

Harry Hammond
The Harry Hammond conviction is relevant to a piece of legislation that is not discussed in the article. Either the example should be removed or the relevant legislation should be discussed if it should be considered "hate speech". Luzzy fogic (talk) 13:11, 16 September 2011 (UTC)

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Reform Section 5 campaign
I'm not sure why this section is here. Section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986 doesn't seem to relate to hate speech, in the sense that an offence under that section needn't relate to the victim's race, sex etc. It's also not mentioned in the rest of the article, making it a total non sequitur. Hairy Dude (talk) 00:00, 29 January 2018 (UTC)
 * I think it does relate and I can see it very easily used against hate speech. Thinker78 (talk) 23:16, 14 August 2018 (UTC)
 * It is relevant to this page, but as a section it's poor. It repeats the same fact twice (that the word "insulting" was removed from the Act) without providing any of the context behind the demands for that to happen (namely a series of high profile stupid prosecutions for, e.g., calling a horse gay. Without the context, this section is useless. Quaestor23 (talk) 13:04, 15 December 2019 (UTC)

Citation needed?
The second paragraph of this article says that "hate speech" is covered by the definition of "hate crimes and hate incidents" and links to the Citizens' Advice Bureau's definition. It claims that hate speech is a "subset of hate crime" but there is no mention at all of "hate speech" in the source cited. Either a different source needs to be added to support the statement that "hate speech" is defined as "forming a subset" of "hate crime and hate incidents" or this claim needs to be removed. If the claim is removed the paragraph is really about hate crime and not hate speech, in which case the whole paragraph should be deleted.

Some of these offences have nothing to do with hate speech; summary comments are misleading.
Section 4a of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 has nothing, as far as I can tell, to do with hate speech. The mere fact that hate speech might qualify as an offence under this section no more makes it a hate speech law than the fact that racially-motivated violence might qualify as assault or GBH makes the laws against assault or GBH hate crime laws.

No, it doesn't. As the quotation immediately below demonstrates. First, 4A is specifically concerned with intentional offences. (The following section deals with offences of this kind more generally.) Second, only certain sorts of behaviour qualify. Telling somebody s/he has cancer may well cause alarm or distress, breaking up with somebody may, telling them the outcome of the 2016 referendum may, informing your Muslim parents you're bisexual may, but none of them is prohibited by these sections of this law (or, to the best of my knowledge, any other. You can't just summarise legislation in this slipshod fashion. It would be better to replace this page with links to the laws themselves than to provide it in this misleading state. 86.5.88.131 (talk) 05:50, 22 November 2022 (UTC)


 * Section 4a is probably included as relevant to hate speech laws in the UK, not that it is its only objective. I modified the text you quoted according to your criticism. Regards, Thinker78  (talk) 23:33, 25 November 2022 (UTC)