Article

Comment

Conspiracy theory

Freedom

Justice

6 February 2025

4 min read

Why free speech might just need a crime of passion defence

Horrific crimes against our humanity tell us we must protect our freedoms, not constrict them.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A protester stands with back to the camera, his baseball hat is turned backwards, it reads 'freedom'.

Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash.

One of the silliest legal defences ever must be the “crime of passion”. Or crime passionnel, as the French knew it for centuries, which should really appear on a menu as one of those haute cuisine desserts they so adore, featuring poached passion fruits in Chantilly sauce: “Non, garcon, tenez-vous la Crepe Suzette. Aujourd’hui je voudrai la crème passionel, s’il vous plait. Et vite – ma femme arrive bientot.” *

But to digress in a first paragraph is a crime journalaise, which incidentally is a piece of Franglais that should apply to everything in Le Figaro. So back to crimes of passion. The idea was that an act of spousal infidelity could arouse such a passionate rage that the romantic interloper deserved what they got. First-degree murder could be downgraded to manslaughter, because obviously there can be no malice aforethought in the heats of passion.

The crime of passion’s bastard offspring is the “gay panic defense”. Note the tell-tale “s” there (though, breathtakingly, interpretations of this defence remain available in both the UK and the US). It runs that a defendant may allege to have found a same-sex sexual advance so offensive or frightening that they were provoked into murdering or otherwise injuring their alleged seducer. Victim-blaming or what?

Anyway, we might want to dust off crime of passion defences because a leaked report from the Home Office suggests that the definition of extremism in law could be extended to cover “extreme misogyny”, “environmental extremism”, “left-wing, anarchist and single-issue extremism” (it even has its own acronym, LASI) and “conspiracy theories”.

Now, I’m all for catching misogyny before anyone gets hurt, but all these things are covered by existing laws. And some of them are just plain bonkers. Were I to be charged with holding an extremist environmental opinion or an extreme left-wing, anarchist or single-issue view, I think I’d want to say that it was a crime of passion.

By which I would mean that there was no malice aforethought because I was acting in the heats of passion for my cause at a time when my balance of mind was impaired. Otherwise, I could get nicked for simply thinking or saying something. Sticks and stones and all that.

But horrific crimes against our humanity tell us we must protect and defend our freedoms, not constrict them. We want to prevent murders, not the saying or thinking of both silly and vile things.

To adopt Serious Face for a moment, I’m aware that hate crimes are a very big thing indeed. How could it be otherwise when we’ve just commemorated Holocaust Memorial Day. And we’ve also the other week had the sentencing of someone – I wouldn’t even spellcheck his name – for the murder of three little girls in Southport.

But horrific crimes against our humanity tell us we must protect and defend our freedoms, not constrict them. We want to prevent murders, not the saying or thinking of both silly and vile things. Our concentration should be on that prevention, not the forbidding of attitudes that might (but probably won’t in the vast majority of cases) lead to a violent crime.

Don’t get me started on Non-Crime Hate Incidents (NCHIs). Oh, you just did. Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson was visited by police last Remembrance Sunday and, surprisingly for someone who has built a career on telling snowflakes to grow a spine, came over all oppressed and persecuted. They were following up a photo she’d posted, claiming it was of Metropolitan Police posing with what she called “Jew-haters” at a London rally in support of Palestine.

In reality, the photo was taken in Manchester and featured Pakistanis, not Palestinians. There was a clue in their flag having “Pakistan” written on it. But that makes her not a very good journalist. Not a bad, far less a criminal, person.

A saying usually ascribed to St Augustine, in one of his letters, is that we are to “hate the sin and love the sinner”. Similarly, we must try to hate the crime, but love the criminal. That must remain humanly impossible for the crimes already mentioned in this column. (Though, astonishingly, history records some Jews finding it in their hearts to forgive their Nazi persecutors).

But we acknowledge that this is where the gospel bar is set. We’re to love our enemies, even if we don’t like them and we condemn their actions. In practice, that means preventing crime in law and holding perpetrators to justice. What it does not mean is going after people who say hateful and stupid things, while other people are actually doing hateful things. The former may and should be about sound intelligence gathering; the latter is effective policing.

This principle is rooted in our culture, founded on the golden rule of loving our enemies and our neighbours as ourselves. There’s always room for forgiveness as well as justice, as crimes of passion demonstrate.

And if that sounds recklessly self-sacrificial, we might look at the Passion of Christ and the crimes of passion that were committed during it. As he said himself, tout est accompli.

* "No, boy, hold the Crêpe Suzette. Today I would like the passion cream, please. And quickly – my wife is coming soon."

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Article

Digital

Work

24 January 2025

4 min read

Back to the office! The suspect motives behind the bosses calling for it

Working From Home isn’t the end of the world.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

An office wall displays a huge motto reading 'punch today in the face'

Really?

Johnson Wang on Unsplash.

If we’d been working from home in 1980, I wouldn’t have met my wife (as she, of course, then wasn’t). The slow demise of the office romance may not exclusively be driven by WFH, when a clumsy or unwanted speculative pass will likely precipitate a visit from the HR police. But it’s sure harder (I’m told) to chat someone up over Zoom than a water-cooler.

There are some things you just, well, have to be there for. And it’s not just a matter of curating the gene pool for the future of the human race, which is hardly the top priority for most employers. Much more immediate commercial demands are served by employees being bodily present at work. They can check colleagues’ body language, be mentored more spontaneously, gossip about work, read the room and go outside for a fag with a friend. None of that works on a laptop at the kitchen table.

And yet these aren’t aspects of working life that are much, if ever, cited by opponents of WFH. Yup, for these bosses, it’s always about productivity, which allegedly slumps like the shoulders of a college-leaver told to re-write their CV, when staff work from home. So companies as diverse as Amazon, Boots and JP Morgan are demanding that their workers work five-day weeks at the office again.

Except, two things: One, that productivity point isn’t true. Professor Nicholas Bloom, an economist at Stanford University, has demonstrated empirically that a hybrid working model of three days at the office, plus two at home, is every bit as productive as fully office-based work overall. And, two, bosses may be shocked to learn that it’s their job to manage productivity, which is just as measurable at home as in the office. But then you don’t get to shout as much.

And there I think is the real point. Bosses might not be shouty, but their motives for office work are more than suspect. They may be obsessed with control. They need to see their staff working for them for proof of productivity. They want to sit in a big glass-walled office watching them. And, perhaps most of all, if staff aren’t in the office then what’s the point of being a boss? It might bring their own productivity management and role into sharper focus.

People who are privileged to manage their own time, or lack of it, in an office really shouldn’t be in the business of lecturing people who are not.

Furthermore, it’s been a long time, if ever, since some of those with the loudest voices calling for a return to the office have ever worked an ordinary job themselves. Lord Rose, formerly CEO of Marks & Spencer and chairman of Asda, told BBC’s Panorama that home working was part of the UK economy’s “general decline” (not true – see above).

And Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, formerly business secretary (remind me, how did that go?), continues in opposition to fight the bad fight to get civil servants as well as the private sector permanently back at the office. Hilariously, he most recently did so in a video from the drawing room of his mansion in Somerset. Though, to be fair, having lost his seat at the last general election and seeing his investment company sliding down the pan, he’s not so much working from home as just... at home.

The serious point is that people who are privileged to manage their own time, or lack of it, in an office really shouldn’t be in the business of lecturing people who are not. They really don’t know – or have forgotten - what it is to have your life demanded of you from 9am-6pm from Monday to Friday in a location that is less than comfortable to work in. Is that so complicated to take aboard?

And there’s another very big thing here. To demand office slaves is to commoditise people, to make them chattels (and, if some of these bosses were honest with themselves, that’s what they want). Staff become just another asset, not unlike the freehold of the office building in which you put them and watch as they make you money every day.

To put it bluntly, that is a sin. To treat human beings as tradeable commodities is to debase their dignity. And for those of faith, that dignity is vested in each unique one of them bearing the image of God. As a good Catholic, Rees-Mogg should be familiar with the doctrine of Imago Dei.

So there’s a holy, as well as secular, work-ethic at play here. The worker is worthy of his/her wage. That scriptural phrase usually focuses on the material value of the wage. But it’s also worth registering that the worker is “worthy”.