On Hate

The temptation of these times

This Substack is an excursus from “The Mechanisms of Unfreedom” series into a very popular emotion. I've been prompted to take this excursion by the perplexing prevalence of hate, both that expressed by ordinary people and used by the power-hungry to further their plans.

Hate is a basic emotion, stemming from the anger which, along with fear, desire, joy and contentment makes up the human experience. As humans, we can easily be overwhelmed by strong feelings and one way of characterising the process of maturation is learning to recognise and work with our emotions. Ignoring or suppressing them doesn't work, at least not in the long term. Long ago, a psychotherapist told me that small children often have murderous feelings which need to be understood as strong emotions rather than the intent to kill. She also pointed out that love and hate are kindred emotions - indifference is far worse.

Of course. It was a lightbulb moment. Suddenly I saw myself as a small child, going through the same process as small children often do in a tantrum, face contorted, limbs flailing, yelling “I hate you/lettuce/Grandma”. Ah, the common humanity! With good parenting, the child moves through the emotional storm and soon falls asleep or starts a new round of play. The expression of those strong feelings was a necessity - how much worse to see a child silent and wary, emotions suppressed.

How curious, then, that in recent years hate has entered the public sphere as something the authorities believe they can eliminate and punish. The rise of “hate speech” and “hate crimes” is deeply puzzling when set against the traditional definition of a crime as something done, not felt. And ironically, the quasi-legislative morass of anonymous allegations and emotional guesswork involved actively fosters accusations motivated by malice.

Non Crime Hate Incidents were introduced in 2014 on a tide of concern about racism. The Hate Crime Operational Guidelines drawn up by the College of Policing (no parliamentary scrutiny required) decreed that police must log all reported “hate incidents” on a database where they would remain for up to six years. A hate incident is defined as something “that falls short of being criminal, but is perceived to be motivated by hostility or prejudice towards a person with a particular characteristic”. You don't need to be the victim to report one; you can inform the police if you witness or hear something which you perceive to be motivated by hostility.

And so it is that children have been investigated for calling each other names and a man logged on the database for whistling the Bob the Builder tune at his neighbour. Neighbour disputes are a common source of NCHIs: one person reported Next Door for hanging “a very large soiled pair of underpants on their washing line … The IP [injured party] believes that [they] are aimed at her because she has an Italian surname and it is in regards to the football”.

The police investigation which follows a complaint can mean a knock on the door. A high profile example is when the journalist Allison Pearson found two police officers on her doorstep on Remembrance Sunday. They'd come to invite her to attend a “voluntary interview” about a tweet she'd posted about a year previously.

Pearson and others such as Harry Miller fought to get their names cleared. But for those whose names remain on the police database, the consequences can be significant. Since a recorded NCHI will show up on a Disclosure Barring Service check – something often needed to work with children and vulnerable people – the informal police record can compromise your ability to earn a living. And a lot of people are potentially affected: between 2014-2024 370,000 NCHIs were recorded by police forces in England and Wales, according to the Free Speech Union.

Scotland has taken this a step further, criminalising statements motivated by “hate”. Under the Hate Crime and Public Order Act which came into force on 1 April 2024 comments relating to age, disability, religion, sexual orientation or gender deemed to “stir up hatred” can land you a prison sentence of up to seven years. The legislation extends to things said in private homes which can be reported anonymously via an online form. Having promised to investigate every allegation, Police Scotland received over 7000 complaints during the first week of the new law. Only 3.8% turned out to be serious.

Imagine the temptation: an angry teenager reporting a parent for a casual remark about a television programme. A jealous guest reporting something said by their object of resentment at a party.

Have lessons been learnt? In the second year of the new law, hate crimes in Scotland are “soaring”. The police put this down to public appreciation as more people realise the possibilities available to them. And so they publicise anti-hate legislation more widely, putting posters at bus stops in the hope of generating yet more allegations. You can see the temptation for there too: with its seductive combination of assumed virtue and control, policing our emotions can be a heady affair.

And so the state reaches into the human heart, attempting to control what we feel. In doing so, it's stepped over the public-private distinction which lies at the heart of democracy and authorised interventions in even the most ordinary of public interactions.

The notion that hate can be stopped by some external authority requires a heavy dose of psychological innocence, whether genuine or wilful. A system whereby individuals can call on the authorities to enter their emotional worlds and adjudicate on everyday communications they did not witness is a license for psychological projection: it gives anyone with a chip on their shoulder or going through a bad phase the means to off-load their feelings onto another. On a society-wide level, it's infantilising: instead of having to deal with the messy business of other people and the feelings they can evoke in us, parent-like figures can step in and pre-empt a necessary internal and social process.

Could it be that psychological naivety and common negative feelings – to use a phrase from the truther movement – are being “weaponised” against us?

As I described in the last Substack, a host of new organisations are now using “hate” as a pretext for censorship. The Center for Countering Digital Hate describes its purpose as stopping “the spread of online hate and disinformation” thanks to its “deep understanding of the online harm landscape”. The campaign group Hope Not Hate claims to have a similar kind of expertise in its ”fight against hate”, infiltrating groups to “collect information”.

The “anti-hate” work of these organisations involves targeting their opponents with the overt intention of doing them harm. The CCDH's focus has been the “far left”; Hope Not Hate is concerned with the “far right”. The common element is a mindset which divides the world into a virtuous Self pitted against an evil Other. From that point of view, all sorts of tactics become legitimate: defamation, destroying businesses and generally using force to shut people up.

And so the emotion of hate becomes a mechanism of unfreedom.

But we have yet to arrive at the main point of this Substack. The foregoing was on the way to something that is said much less often in these shouty, binary times.

Below is a screenshot of a recent page from The Daily Sceptic, a website known for its criticism and exposure of the abuses and absurdities of recent years which has republished or highlighted a number of my Substacks. It is linked to The Free Speech Union.

Side by side they sit, a piece highlighting the absurdity of hate incidents and an article condemning the pro-Palestinian performance of the rap punk duo Bob Vylan at Glastonbury.

Now it just so happens that I have considerable background in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Following a PhD which involved reading witness accounts and the history of the Holocaust, I spent a summer as a volunteer English teacher in a West Bank, having briefly considered the Kibbutz option. Subsequently, I visited the Palestinian Territories as an aid worker and journalist and went on to write a book about Lebanon. My focus was on “the human stories” of a part of the world that is immeasurably different from the way it's portrayed in the West.

There were easier ways to make a living and much of the time I didn't even do that. But the experience was hugely enriching: one of the main characteristics of Arab society are levels of tolerance and humanity which put Western society to shame. I also witnessed the behaviour of the Israeli Defence Forces towards the inhabitants of the Occupied Territories and frequently heard testimony from British and Israeli sources about the shootings, incursions and demolitions frequently carried out by that army. A degree of journalistic detachment meant I was never fully part of the UK's big pro-Palestinian movement, but I had many activist friends and contacts. This is by way of saying that while death chants weren't usual, the idea of the statement “Free Palestine” becoming subject to a police investigation was unthinkable. Back then, Britain was a free country!

My experience of the Middle East is why I know some things that most people don’t know. I know, for example, exactly what the Palestinian activist Sarah Wilkinson meant when she said the counter-terrorist police who raided her home behaved like more like Israeli security forces than the British police officers (and I understand the implications of that observation). I know that Islam, like all religious traditions, is much more varied than outsiders believe: my time with Sufis in Britain could knock a few preconceptions on the head. And the complexity of Middle Eastern politics, with all its covert alliances and proxy wars, was a lesson in not accepting the official line about Ukraine. I knew that I didn’t know enough about the conflict to know what was going on.

A few days after Israel began bombing Tehran, I went to a local cafe run by an Iranian couple. I found the proprietor compulsively checking her phone to see if her family were still all right: the previous day the apartment block next to her sister's had been bombed. We had exactly the conversation I'd anticipated, one which acknowledged that few Iranian people support the Iranian regime AND that at the same time they do not enjoy being attacked. We also discovered a shared reluctance to talk about Middle Eastern affairs in Britain.

The Iranian woman and I tend to remain silent because we understand that British society – by which I mean most of the mainstream and a good chunk of the freedom movement – cannot hear us. It is too angry and focused on its chosen objects of hate. In the strange shift that has taken place over the past decade, people no longer know that they don't know. “Oh, the Middle East is complicated” was a common response when I used to return from a trip, full of insights and information. And so we would leave it at that.

In a sense they were right. Middle Eastern politics – by which I mean the geopolitical forces that have shaped the borders of countries as well as their internal politics - are unimaginably complex. Long-standing conflicts between innumerable parties and tribes of different religions and economic interests play out, alliances shift and all the while daily life goes on, its focus largely on food and relationships. Few here realise how much of the conflicts of the Middle East have been fuelled by interference from “foreign actors” such as the US and the UK. But people there generally understand that A Great Game is being played around them, with powerful leaders competing for territory, resources and loyalties. In that respect, the average twenty year old tends to be more politically sophisticated than their Western counterpart.

But in contemporary Britain, it seems that a lack of knowledge or understanding is no impediment to having a strong opinion and taking a side. People who never had any prior interest in Middle Eastern affairs join the calls to Ban! Bomb! Ban! Bomb!

How is it that so many people – including those highly distrustful of our current leaders and attuned to propaganda – have been conscripted to support censorship at home and killing abroad?

The answer has something to do with the temptation of hate.

Since the articles in the screenshot above, The Daily Sceptic has run a number of pieces about the Glastonbury performance, including one calling for BBC Director General Tim Davie to be sent to prison for allowing the footage to be broadcast. The argument is that he should be punished as harshly as Lucy Connolly, the woman doing a 31 month prison sentence for a tweet whose story The Daily Sceptic has covered extensively and sympathetically.

This is a very odd approach to free speech. Instead of upholding its underlying principle, one traditionally expressed as “I may not agree with what you say but I will defend your right to say it”, free speech has become partisan, defended loudly when it coincides with the right (geo)politics but condemned in tones of outrage when it doesn't. It’s an expression of the prevailing warlike mentality, a tit-for-tatness which bears more than a passing resemblance to the economics of prisoner exchange: if you're going to take one of OUR people, then we want one of YOURS!

Without an understanding of social psychology, this would be utterly baffling. The conscription of British hatred to the Middle East conflict is part of a wider trend which began about two years ago with the sudden emergence of attitudes that can only be described as xenophobic. Hostility is aimed at a new “out group” which ranges, depending on the speaker, from illegal migrants to immigrants in general and can extend as widely “foreigners” and people with dark skin. Often, the comments focus on Muslims, understood only as adherents to the fundamentalist branch of Sunni Islam. In a country which has never worried about religion and has been widely considered multi-ethnic for decades, the rise of the new hatred is most perplexing.

Here's a thing about hate: it requires an object.

Here's another thing about hate: it's a child of anger. If handled with emotional intelligence, anger dissipates quickly and doesn't coalesce into hatred. Of course the screaming child doesn't really want her parents dead!

When many people in a society become angry about things they feel powerless to change, or perhaps don't understand what they're angry about, a lot of free-floating anger can be generated. Free-floating emotions are uncomfortable and tend to seek a place to land. So the psyche goes looking for an object against which to discharge its anger, and the one it finds becomes the object of hate.

That generates two further problems. When anger is held and hardens into a position of hate it tends to corrode the host personality: we all know an adult who's got stuck in anger and remains fixated on particular people and situations. And when anger is consistently directed at an object which is also capable of strong emotion, the other party usually gets angry back. And so social division and the public legitimacy for foreign conflict is created. The powerful have long realised the potential of hate as a tool for realising their aims: if they can generate enough of it, and direct it in the right direction, it can get the public behind this law or that war.

Back and forth, round and round we go, repeating the same patterns powered by the same unprocessed emotions.

No police officer, no prison sentence and no amount of bombing is going to Stop Hate. What could transmute it is the cumulative effects of inner processes within individuals and a cultural shift involving different collective choices. In the meantime, a return to the old-fashioned principle of Free Speech For All could be beautifully unifying!

Aid could come from one outside force. You could consider it an attack of conscience, the “tower moment” from Tarot, or an epiphany born of crisis. In “Disturb us Lord”, the sea-faring poet Sir Francis Drake characterises this shaking out of our complacency as disturbance:

The fourth piece in “The Mechanisms of Unfreedom” series will be published at the end of this month ahead of a break in August. It will attempt to get to the heart of the matter and examine some of the key ways in which democracy is being circumvented and dismantled. Somewhat accidentally, it will also bring together some important information that anyone who may use the NHS needs to know.