How the Race Relations Act Turned Britain into a Totalitarian Anti-Fascist Nineteen Eighty-Four

This article originally appeared in Pimlico Journal. You can read more of its work here.

Following a number of high-profile arrests for speech-related crimes, Britain is seen as far as the White House as a realm of tinpot, two-tier woke tyranny, where authors of errant tweets can expect to spend more time in prison than sex pests and paedophiles and which commentators and comedians should avoid — lest they be whisked straight from arrivals to a holding cell having offended Left-wing orthodoxies.

Lucy Connolly, a mother and childminder who received a 31-month prison sentence for ‘inciting racial hatred’ over a single (quickly deleted) tweet posted in the wake of the Southport Murders, is just one of many Brits that the state has pursued for such crimes in recent years. British police presently make 30 arrests per day for online speech offences, with many of these treated far more seriously than violent, sexual, or acquisitive crimes. Connolly’s was one of 44 convictions for ‘stirring up racial hatred’ last year, a record high induced by Lord Hermer, who advised during the summer 2024 unrest that the sixty-year-old offence could be used to go after online speech. As Attorney General, Hermer is required to sign off on each individual charge for these offences.

Today, many understand the Connolly case as part of Labour’s draconian crackdown on that unrest, and therefore as a specific issue with ‘two-tier Keir’ and his government’s persecution of its political opponents. In reality, the problem goes deeper than those people suggest. Indeed, apologists for Connolly’s conviction are correct to point out that her punishment was well within current sentencing guidelines, and thereby to imply that her imprisonment represents the normal functioning of modern British justice. The British state has been set up in this way for decades, with draconian speech laws restricting the ability of the native majority to express dissent having been its favoured method of managing a multicultural society since the sixties.

As a previous Pimlico Journal contributor has noted:

Here, large scale multiculturalism undemocratically arose in the latter decades of the twentieth century, without popular consent being given, or even sought, and thus was doomed from the start. Unlike in Singapore, British multiculturalism carries the stench of imposition; a top-down experiment whose costs are borne unevenly, and whose benefits are loudly asserted, but rarely felt.

This well summarises the inherently unstable nature of our political settlement on immigration, and why it has necessitated such stringent constraints on our liberties. However, to understand the speech restrictions under which we now suffer and the unequal justice that flows from them, one must understand their intellectual roots as well as their legal basis.

The Parliamentary debate at the Second Reading of the Race Relations Act 1965 (RRA) is illuminative for this purpose. Speaking in favour of the bill, Labour MP for Dover David Ennals gave the following argument:

The hon. Member for Buckinghamshire, South, said that the Bill would be an encroachment on personal freedom. I do not know what sort of personal freedom he was talking about. Was he talking about the personal freedom to discriminate against people because of their colour, nationality or ethnic group—the freedom to stir up hatred against other groups? I should not have thought that this was the sort of freedom that we would wish to preserve in our society.

The right hon. Member for Monmouth (Mr. Thorneycroft), in a speech which introduced an unfortunate party element, referred to the taints of criminality on the kindly British people. It is not the kindly British people who are the targets of the Bill; it is those twisted people—and happily they are few in our society—who can cause great harm and great damage and great hurt to fellow human beings who, we believe, must be enabled to live in equality with ourselves.

I welcome the Bill. It is necessary to put the law on the side of racial equality and non-discrimination. I agree with those who have said that this is not a subject in respect of which legislation is easy. We must not restrain legitimate freedoms. It is clear from the drafting of the Bill and from our knowledge of those behind it that there is no intention of restricting legitimate human freedoms. It is clear, too, that it is not the intention of the Bill to round up and catch as many as we can who are found to be discriminating. Cases can be brought only with the authority of the Director of Public Prosecutions.

We fought a war for freedom, and all Members, on both sides of the House, wish to preserve that freedom. But we also fought a war against an abominable racist theory, and while, in the main, that theory was defeated with the people who advocated it, there are still some in our community who advocate similar theories. It is against those that the Bill is directed.

Sir Barnett Janner MP likewise drew a parallel with Nazism, arguing, dubiously, that more aggressive laws against hate speech could have prevented the rise of Hitler in Weimar Germany, and that they ought to be brough in here to prevent such an “abuse of freedom”. Reginald Freeson MP believed that an incorrigible ten percent of the population were “highly prejudiced”, and that these were “people whom one must try to separate off from the general community” and “isolate”. Combining these two themes, the solicitor-general, Sir Dingle Foot, said that “there is a section of the community… which is guilty of incitement to racial prejudice and racial violence” and that the bill then under consideration sought to prevent something similar to 1930s antisemitism arising in Britain “in relation to the coloured immigrants”.

The viewpoints expressed above can be summarised as anti-racialism in service of anti-fascism. Rejection of racial universalism is understood as an entirely illegitimate perspective and necessarily a precursor to totalitarian political goals, justifying its suppression in liberal terms. We were the ones who beat Hitler, of course. But with the British Empire retroactively reconceived as a project of racial supremacism, the British public has in the decades since become simply ‘the fascists who won’, as Jon Gower Davies notes drily in his study, Bonfires on the Ice: The Multicultural Harrying of Britain.

A vogue for psychological behaviourism plays a powerful role in this mindset. Theories like the ‘Pyramid of Hate’, which posits that the exhibition of minor biases sits on a behavioural continuum with the committing of genocide, or Frankfurt School psychologist Theodor Adorno’s methodologically dubious but highly influential ‘Authoritarian Personality’, cast white Western publics as an eternally unexploded bomb, liable to bring about their own holocausts if left to their inherent prejudices. As such, the public must be interrogated and re-educated by far-reaching structures of social engineering — both as punishment for and to prevent the awakening of their latent ‘racism’ and illiberalism.

It’s now trite to note that anything perceived as nationalism, ethnocentrism, or ‘racism’ (at least on the part of whites) is placed firmly on a spectrum with Hitler within Leftist demonology, but failure to understand the origins of this conflation often leads to the mistaken assumption that it is a purely tactical refrain. The psychologization of fascism means that anyone giving voice to nativist sentiment must be anathema, justifying any level of social condemnation and state repression. That a people might have perfectly justifiable reasons to object to immigration and demographic change even on explicitly liberal grounds cannot be considered.

By carrying this pathological worldview onto the statute book, the Race Relations Act marked a sea change in the telos of the British state. Today, ‘anti-racism’ and ‘anti-fascism’ form central planks of the governing ideology. We could name any number of state bodies which have made public declarations of loyalty to these goals, but the sentiment is captured most neatly in the figure of Lord Hermer — a human rights lawyer who in his youth (and well into his professional career) was part of the radical ‘anti-fascist’ campaigning magazine Searchlight, which has long been alleged to be linked to the security state, as has its more infamous offshoot ‘Hope not Hate’. Searchlight hailed Hermer as a “dedicated anti-fascist” upon his elevation to Attorney General last year. Hermer himself boasted of his achievements after his signing off on a record number of prosecutions for speech offences in 2024.

In George Orwell’s Coming Up For Air, suburban everyman protagonist George Bowling is dragged by his wife to a meeting of the Left Book Club for a lecture on ‘The Menace of Fascism’. Initially bemused, after a while he gains a chilling insight into what is really in the head of the frothing Paul Mason-esque lecturer as he rants away (‘rubber truncheons…’ ‘back to the Dark Ages…’ ‘defence of democracy…’)

What he’s saying is merely that Hitler’s after us and we must all get together and have a good hate. Doesn’t go into details. Leaves it all respectable. But what he’s seeing is something quite different. It’s a picture of himself smashing people’s faces in with a spanner. Fascist faces, of course. I know that’s what he was seeing. It was what I saw myself for the second or two that I was inside him. Smash! Right in the middle! The bones cave in like an eggshell and what was a face a minute ago is just a great big blob of strawberry jam. Smash! There goes another! That’s what’s in his mind, waking and sleeping, and the more he thinks of it the more he likes it. And it’s all O.K. because the smashed faces belong to Fascists. You could hear all that in the tone of his voice.

Of course, this scene anticipates the better known ‘Two Minutes Hate’ in Nineteen Eighty-Four — and it’s no coincidence that Orwell chooses Britain as the setting for the totalitarian anti-fascism of Airstrip one. If the activities of the UK state today conjure visions of a Socialist Worker’s Party boot stamping on a human face forever, the Race Relations Act provides insight as to why.

First, consider the very concept of ‘stirring up’ ‘racial hatred’. The meaning of this is by no means obvious. We are told today that the law must be “so far as is possible, intelligible, clear and predictable”. With offences such as criminal damage, arson, or GBH, material evidence can plainly show one way or another whether a crime has been committed. The results are physical, visible, and measurable. But when it comes to “stirring up racial hatred”, the limits of what’s permissible are defined instead by a nebulous metaphor. What exactly counts as ‘racial hatred’, and what does it entail to ‘stir it up’? In this sense, it is akin to the archaic offence of seditious libel, an “accordion-like concept” as on critic puts it, “expandable or contractible at whim”. This quality makes any law based on the concept inevitably arbitrary and subject to political judgement, and renders neutral application impossible.

So far as its meaning can be divined, this metaphor would seem to contain within it a grim admission about the history of British immigration policy and race relations. The suggestion is there was a latent element of corruption within British society in 1965, which, when brought into reaction with new arrivals from the commonwealth, could explode into violence — making any multicultural project untenable.

The Act, brought in by Harold Wilson’s Labour in reaction to tensions and race riots brought about by two decades of unpopular postwar Commonwealth migration, was therefore itself an admission that the story of successful multiracialism which its proponents wished to tell was untrue. It seems the advocates and architects of multicultural Britain themselves believed that the country they were building was at odds with the basic sentiments of the British people in a fashion which turned those sentiments into tinder ready to be lit.

One might imagine that such a recognition would prompt a rethink of the whole idea. Instead, rather than taking responsibility as a government not to pursue policies which would create an inherent instability in society, the state placed the responsibility on the public to avoid any behaviour which might cause the unstable situation to collapse. This ‘punish the proles’ attitude has not gone away. A recent state social cohesion commission stuffed with pro-migration activists admitted that multicultural Britain has become a “tinderbox”, yet rather than criticising the immigration policies that led to this situation, they placed the onus on ordinary citizens to treat “national belonging” as a “whole-of-society challenge”. This is a tremendous burden to put on normal people, for whom national belonging should be a natural extension of who they are and how they live their lives, not an intellectual challenge to which they must dedicate increasingly large amounts of time in order to accommodate foreign ways of life.

The RRA refers to a “section of the public in Great Britain distinguished by colour, race, or ethnic or national origins”. This phrase — ‘section of the public in Great Britain’ — is notable, since it implies a particular understanding of which groups then constituted “the public”. Of course, this was (and remains) a matter of considerable political controversy: at what point does a newly arrived immigrant or immigrant group become part of “the public”, deserving of accommodation on equal grounds with other groups?

In the 1960s, a typical naturalisation period was five years; yet in that decade, Enoch Powell received major public support for his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in which he called for the repatriation of Commonwealth migrants. Implicitly, under the RRA, however, such questions over the boundaries of national belonging and the extent to which foreign populations are to be included therein are resolved by legislative fiat. Dissenting opinions on the topic, rather than being engaged with, were simply rendered illegal. Britain’s new multicultural identity was imposed top-down, with the full force of the law.

Problems with the RRA were identified right from the start. Conservative MP Bill Deedes argued that creating such offences would delegitimise the police by demanding they enforce a law which did not command the support of large sections of the population and by making them “the instruments of what is fundamentally a political gesture”. This would put law enforcement in an “intolerable” position. Sixty years hence, complaints of two-tier policing are commonplace, and respect for the institution is at an all-time low.

The bill also represented the criminalisation of speech even if that speech was not likely to cause an imminent breach of the peace — a common law standard going back centuries. Another Conservative MP, Ronald Bell, noted that under its terms “we shall be looking to the content of the words which are uttered, to the opinion, and it is the opinion, the view itself, which will be outlawed”. The bill therefore began a transition from the material test of whether speech is likely to be the proximal cause of violence to an inherently subjective and fundamentally political assessment of the emotions that might be aroused by it.

As Ian Rons has noted in the Daily Sceptic: “the law for the first time made citizens in some sense responsible purely for the feelings of their fellows, on the very flimsy assumption that if there is hatred then ‘violence [is] probably not far away’” – i.e. on dubious ideas of behaviourism. In order to play manager of a multiracial society, the British state annexed to itself responsibility for that society’s emotions – for its level of ‘hate’. Later down this authoritarian-therapeutic road, its ambit would expand to include speech that might cause “distress”, “alarm”, be “grossly offensive”, or most recently, cause “non-trivial psychological harm”.

If the state was interested in the emotions speech might give rise to, it now also saw fit to punish citizens merely for the emotions that may have given rise to their speech. To count as criminal under this offence, speech need not have actually stirred up hatred, or even have been likely to do so – this only needs to have been ‘intended’. It can thus operate as a form of thought crime – punishing blasphemy against multiculturalist pieties. In the 16^th century, Elizabeth I had professed “no desire to make windows into men’s souls”; in the reign of Elizabeth II, police and prosecutors were now expected to do just that. Today, dutifully anti-racist judges routinely demonstrate the anti-heretical intent of such speech prosecutions by denouncing defendants as a “bigot”, lecturing them about diversity, or handing down a particularly harsh sentence because “a message must go out”.

And what if, during the course of this historically unprecedented experiment in transforming a country’s population, it may have been necessary, at various points along the way, to raise criticisms of a particular group in order to call attention to their destructive or undesirable behaviours? Scrutinising the legislation by pushing it to its logical extreme, Bell imagined the “fanciful example, that a group of Hungarian refugees had established a stranglehold upon the Government of the country… Ought it then be a criminal offence to say so in public?”. Such possibilities seem ever less fanciful by the day, and yet they are only one of many such outcomes that one might wish at least to discuss.

Donald Chapman, Labour MP for Birmingham Northfield, blithely dismissed such concerns. “[I]n such circumstances the intention of that person is to criticise a group of people whatever their nationality for having cornered the Government, and, having done it, being immigrants into the bargain. It is not the intention of that person to stir up racial hatred per se, which is what the Clause demands as the test before a prosecution can be started.” On this reading, it would be perfectly possible to criticise the actions of a racial group without either ‘hating’ them or intending to stir up hatred against them, and the law, properly interpreted, should draw a distinction between the two.

Of course, this was not the reading which was ultimately adopted by the courts, nor is it the interpretation under which we now live. In practice, it is almost impossible to draw this distinction — not that the state cares to do so in any case — meaning that factual albeit controversial statements about a group can be prosecuted under the RRA.

Take the case of Sam Melia, an activist jailed for stirring up racial hatred last year for a stickering campaign. While some offending messages were straightforwardly antisemitic, the messages that Judge Tom Bayliss KC deemed particularly blameworthy and which seem to have pushed his actions into a higher category of culpability were regarding the rape gangs: “Labour loves Muslim rape gangs” and “Stop anti-white rape gangs”. Judge Bayliss said: “They make specific use of the issue of the ethnicity of both perpetrators and victims of grooming gangs presenting Muslims as a sexual threat and a risk to white people.” Of course, that Labour councils have been heavily implicated in enabling these gangs and that their pattern of offending was both targeted specifically at white girls and, at least in part, motivated by racial animus, are both well attested facts – but this didn’t stop these comments being treated as criminal.

Similarly, consider former boxer Derek Heggie, who in YouTube videos posted during the Southport unrest said, not untruthfully, that “young white girls are being raped by these grooming gangs that worship the Prophet Muhammad”. Or Lee Dunn, who during the same period posted three images of what were clearly supposed to be illegal Islamic migrants with variants of the caption “coming to a town near you”. Both were convicted of racially aggravated speech offences for their undeniably factual statements. Throughout the grooming gangs scandal, public servants and many others failed to speak out about what they saw. While many point to their fear of social or professional consequences for doing so, one must also note that by speaking out, especially as a lone voice, such people would have risked being criminalised themselves.

Though the anti-racist state was still in embryo in the 1960s, the implications of this far-reaching legislation were vast even at that early stage. The government now had the power to criminalise opinions, factual statements, and even thoughts. It annexed to itself responsibility for managing the emotions of society and the way in which individuals influenced these emotions through speech. It presumed to dictate to the public the limits of acceptable discussion on questions of belonging to the political community, and transformed the police into a politicised instrument of state ‘antiracism’. Finally, it inaugurated the principle that the law should not be colourblind, but rather should take the identity of the alleged criminal and victim seriously into account at every stage of the process.

A survey of how the offence of ‘stirring up racial hatred’ has expanded since then reveals the increasing ambition and censoriousness of the antiracist state. By the Public Order Act 1986, which re-issued the offence, the wording had changed: “section of the public in Great Britain” had become merely a “group of persons in Great Britain”. Few would consider illegal migrants or asylum seekers as members of the public, but they are nevertheless a group of persons in Great Britain — so when Lucy Connolly noted her indifference to their suffering in an unfortunately phrased tweet, she found herself guilty.

In 2001, the geographic limitation to the UK was also removed, with racial hatred since then defined as “hatred against a group of persons defined by reference to colour, race, nationality (including citizenship) or ethnic or national origins” — regardless of whether there is even a single member of that group residing within Britain. As a result, a law which was supposedly designed to safeguard British public order and “section[s] of the public in Great Britain” now makes it illegal to criticise foreign nationals who have never even set foot in the country. Indeed, if Elon Musk ever does make it to Mars and discovers there an alien species which, after its first encounter with our astronauts develops an unfortunate taste for human flesh, this law would presumably make it illegal for people in Britain to identify them as nasty bug creatures and to suggest we might be better off if we did not allow this particular species to be brought to our shores — provided, that is, they are understood as “persons”.

Before long, an array of other offences had arrived, including the Communications Act 2003 (Section 127), the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006, and the Online Safety Act 2023, which traded on many of the same ideas and assumptions. Perhaps the most impactful piece of legislation on the subject is the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, which introduced the concept of a ‘hate crime’ for the first time.

A key judgement on the interpretation of that law reveals just how ambitious the anti-racist state has become. R v Rogers [2007] saw Phillip Rogers attempt to appeal his conviction for a racially aggravated public order offence under the CDA 1998 section 31. Disabled and a user of a mobility scooter, whilst returning from the pub Rogers had tried to get past three Spanish women on the pavement. Unable to do so, he confronted them, calling them “bloody foreigners” and telling them “get back to your own country”. His appeal argued that “foreigners” did not count as a racial group under the terms of the CDA, but drawing on Race Relations Act precedent, Baroness Hale ruled that it did:

The mischiefs attacked by the aggravated versions of these offences are racism and xenophobia. Their essence is the denial of equal respect and dignity to people who are seen as “other”. This is more deeply hurtful, damaging and disrespectful to the victims than the simple versions of these offences. It is also more damaging to the community as a whole, by denying acceptance to members of certain groups not for their own sake but for the sake of something they can do nothing about. This is just as true if the group is defined exclusively as it is if it is defined inclusively.

Her judgement reveals the crusading intention behind such laws, with Hale explaining the intent of this offence explicitly in terms of engineering the sentiments of British people to universalist ends. While ordinary laws prohibit specific actions, here the state brought into its sights the attitudes themselves — the mere “mischiefs” of intolerance. In the view of Baroness Hale, it is damaging to the community as a whole if “non-British” or “foreign” groups are “den[ied] acceptance”. Foreigners, by definition, are not part of the national community — which raises the question: what ‘community’ is our legal establishment protecting if even this distinction is offensive under the law?

The key question that must be asked is what the goal of the state should be. In his book Taboo, Professor Eric Kaufmann describes how the anti-racism taboo, which crystallised in the 1960s, has since expanded dramatically outward, serving as the Big Bang of the modern Western moral universe. Wokeness on race soon spread to gender and sexuality, and the need to validate sacred minorities and protect them from harm became the highest social value. In Britain, the Race Relations Act inaugurates an analogous process in the architecture of our state.

Where once our government sought to secure the liberty, safety, and prosperity of the British people, now its animating creed is the immediate management of ‘community relations’ and the long-term elimination of particularistic sentiments and identities which risk the stability of the multicultural project: ‘anti-racism’ and ‘anti-fascism’. This totalitarian impulse has no limiting principle, and accommodations that may have seemed reasonable at the time have evolved to prevent people speaking their mind on the most controversial and significant political question our society has ever faced.

Today, in a period of demographic change that has been shockingly rapid and entirely unconsented to, we must be able to speak freely about the future of our nation. For that to be possible, our great repeal must not stop at the oft-cited and admittedly egregious Blair-era restrictions. It must remove the full body of law that restricts our freedoms, so we might conform our politics to the sentiments of the people — not the other way around.

Stop Press: Laurie discusses many of the themes of this article with Dr David Starkey in today’s episode of the Sceptic. You can watch it here.