Welcome to The Spectator podcast. I'm Lara Prendergast.

Since the result of the EU referendum was announced back in June, the UK media has reported a large

upswing in the number of hate crimes being reported. One of the trends that has been noted

as a particularly high occurrence of such incidents in areas that voted leave.

But in his cover piece, Brendan O'Neill argues that there is an unhinged subjectivity to hate crime reporting,

which is skewed statistics in favour of self-critical moralisation. So, has there really been a post-Brexit surge in hostility towards minority groups?

Or is our metric for recording

these crimes simply off-kilter? I'm joined now by Brendan O'Neill and Kevin O'Sullivan, who was

recently cleared after spending 20 months defending himself from a hate crime allegation. So,

Brendan, what actually is a hate crime? That's a good question. It's pretty much anything. It's

entirely subjective. And the thing that really

amazes me the thing I've written about is how you know everyone always moans about

the fact that we live in a post-truth world and everything's supposed to be

evidence-based and we're all supposed to be obsessed with facts but when it comes

to hate crime that all goes out of the window and it's all entirely down to the

perception of the victim so the victim feels And it's all entirely down to the perception of the victim. So if the

victim feels that he or she was subjected to a hate crime, then they were. That's the bottom line.

Their word is gospel. And I mean, they actually say this. In police procedures and policies,

they actually say you don't need to have evidence to prove hatred as a motivating

factor in a crime. You simply have to take the victim's word for it. So that opens up a whole

kind of Orwellian subjective free-for-all, which means that pretty much anyone for saying almost

anything could have the hate crime finger pointed at them. It's quite Stalinist,

...