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Ministers’ initial refusal to say Frank Hester’s comments were racist speaks volumes
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2024
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
After Frank Hester’s comments about Diane Abbott were published, the businessman who is the Conservative party’s biggest donor said in a statement that he accepted he was rude about her but “the criticism had nothing to do with her gender nor colour of skin”.
Shabna Begum, the interim CEO of the race equality thinktank the Runnymede Trust, said she found it shocking that there was any debate that what he said was racist and that it gave the lie to the Conservative narrative that the UK is a “post-racial society”.
But Georgina Calvert-Lee, an employment and equality barrister at Bellevue Law, said – assuming he had said what was reported – that would provide no defence were he to face a civil claim for harassment, which she said he would have “a really hard job” disproving.
Sailesh Mehta, a barrister and founding member of the Bar Human Rights Committee, said Hester’s comments, if as reported, were “capable of fitting the ingredients of the criminal offence [of stirring up racial hatred] created by the Public Order Act”.
He said it was rarely prosecuted, except in the most compelling cases, because of free speech considerations, but added: “Political leaders are increasingly using incendiary language, which appears to give licence to their followers to be ever more shrill in their rhetoric.
“So we’ve got on the one hand, this really heavy-handed, very blunt approach toward black and minority ethnic groups in terms of what they can say when they are committing hate crimes versus here we’ve got this powerful white man making a really baldly racist statement about hating a black woman, wanting her to be shot and we’re still debating whether it’s racist or not.”
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