UK : On Hate Race Crimes

Prosecutors press for action against BNP leaflets - The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/20...

The threshold for securing a conviction is so high that far-right activists are able to evade prosecution for material that many people would consider to be threatening and racist, according to sources at the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).

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Senior prosecutors are calling for the laws on race hate crimes to be strengthened to counter the threat posed by the British National party.

The threshold for securing a conviction is so high that far-right activists are able to evade prosecution for material that many people would consider to be threatening and racist, according to sources at the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).

Prosecutors blame the lack of convictions on the strict legal test, which requires showing an intention to "stir up racial hatred" or a likelihood that racial tension would be stirred up.”  - The Guardian

The question that has to be asked in the UK, and the rest of the world, is what is lacking in society that requires proscriptions on ‘racist materials’ that might ‘stir up racial hatred’, ‘or a likelihood that racial tension would be stirred up.’

The existence of Laws, might at times serve to maintain the conditions upon which such laws may be flouted, and which hence requires the promulgation and enforcement of such laws. 

In other words, there seems to be a symbiotic union between thoughtfulness and a preceding thoughtlessness that sees the production of a rabid dog and, thereafter, a leash of a particular length. Whilst focusing on strengthening the latter, I think it is about time that humanity look into the conditions that produces the former.  It is in this sense that ‘thoughtfulness’ might very well be complicit in the evil it seeks to counter.  As I’ve been saying for some years now, evil cannot exist without the symbiotic collusion of that which is perceived to be ‘good’.  The devil, sir, reigns via paradox.

With regards to the BNP’s racist materials, such phenomena would cease to exist when the conditions that bring about the impressionable demand for it, and the violence that might thus be incited by it, is snipped at its source.  Is it the idea that is evil or the conditions that produces susceptibility to it? 

And whilst you’re at it, try to consider how the empathy compromising national fragmentation of humanity continues to feed the thus localised tendency to blame on the basis of ‘race’.  Perhaps it is this crime that serves as a significant component of the basis upon which a global problem is localised?

I cannot help but wonder.

Ed

The Cosmopolitan Manifesto