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

Comment

Justice

Leading

Politics

7 July 2025

5 min read

The consequences of truth-telling are so severe our leaders can’t admit their mistakes

When accountability means annihilation, denial is the only way to survive

Leah Brown

Leah is a campaigner for restorative practices and founder of The WayFinders Group.

Baroness Casey.

BBC.

Why do our leaders struggle so profoundly with admitting error?

Media and inquiries regularly report on such failures in the NHS, the Home Office, the Department of Work and Pensions, HMRC, the Metropolitan Police, the Ministry of Defence, and so many more public institutions. Often accompanied by harrowing personal stories of the harm done.

In a recent white paper (From harm to healing: rebuilding trust in Britain’s publicly funded institutions), I defined “harm” as a holistic concept occurring where physical injury or mental distress is committed and sustained and explained that harm is generally something that is caused, possibly resulting in injury or loss of life.

When we look at harm from an institutional perspective, structural power dynamics inevitably oppress certain groups, limit individual freedoms, and negatively affect the safety and security of individuals. But when we look at it through the lens of the individuals who run those institutions, we see people who often believe that they are acting in good faith, believe that their decisions won’t have a significant impact, who don’t have time to think about the decisions they are making, or worse still, prefer to protect what is in their best interest.

Even well-intentioned leaders can become complicit in cycles of harm - not just through malice, but through their lack of self-awareness and unwillingness to put themselves in the shoes of the person on the receiving end of their decisions.

Martin Luther King Jr supposedly said, “the ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” In contemporary politics, leaders are neither selected nor (largely) do they remain, because of their humility. Humility is synonymous with weakness and showing weakness must be avoided at all cost. Responsibility is perceived as something that lies outside of us, rather than something we can take ownership of from within.

So, why do leaders struggle so profoundly with admitting error?

The issue is cultural and three-fold.

First, we don’t quantify or systematically address human error, allowing small mistakes to escalate.

We then enable those responsible to evade accountability through institutional protection and legal barriers.

Finally, we actively discourage truth-telling by punishing whistle-blowers rather than rewarding transparency. Taken together, these create the very conditions that transform errors into institutional harm.

Nowhere is this plainer than in Baroness Casey’s recent report on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse that caused the Government to announce a grooming gangs inquiry. In this case, the initial harm was compounded by denial and obfuscation, resulting not just in an institutional failure to protect children, but system-wide failures that have enabled the so-called “bad actors” to remain in situ.

Recently, this trend was bucked at Countess of Chester Hospital where the police arrested three hospital managers involved in the Lucy Letby investigation. Previously, senior leadership had been protected, thus allowing them to evade accountability. Humble leadership would look like acting when concerns are raised before they become scandals. However, in this case, leadership did act; they chose to bury the truth rather than believe the whistle-blowers.

Until we separate admission of error from institutional destruction, we will continue to incentivise the very cover-ups that erode public trust.

The answer to our conundrum is obvious. In Britain, accountability is conflated with annihilation. Clinging onto power is the only option because admitting error has become synonymous with career suicide, legal liability, and is tantamount to being hanged in the gallows of social media. We have managed to create systems of governing where the consequences of truth-telling are so severe that denial is the only survival mechanism left. We have successfully weaponised accountability rather than understanding it as the foundation of trust.

If Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council had admitted even half of the failures Alexis Jay OBE identified in her 2013 report and that Baroness Casey identifies in her 2025 audit, leaders would face not only compensation claims but media storms, regulatory sanctions, and individual prosecutions. It’s so unthinkable to put someone through that that we shrink back with empathy as to why someone might not speak up. But this is not justice. Justice is what the families of Hillsborough have been seeking in the Public Authority (Accountability) Bill: legal duties of candour, criminal offences for those who deliberately mislead investigations or cover-up service failures, legal representation, and appropriate disclosure of documentation.

Regardless of your political persuasion, it has to be right that when police misconduct occurs, officers should fear not only disciplinary action and criminal charges. When politicians admit mistakes, they should face calls for their resignation. Public vilification is par for the course. Being ejected from office is the bare minimum required to take accountability for their actions.

The white paper shows that the cover-up always causes more damage than the original error. Institutional denial - whether relating to the Post Office sub-postmasters, the infected blood scandal victims, grooming gang victims, Grenfell Towers victims, Windrush claimants, or Hillsborough families - compounds the original harm exponentially.

In a society beset with blame, shame, and by fame, it is extraordinary that this struggle to admit error is so pervasive. Survivors can and will forgive human fallibility. What they will not forgive is the arrogance of institutions that refuse to acknowledge when they have caused harm.

The white paper refers to a four-fold restorative framework that starts with acknowledgment, not punishment. The courage to say “we were wrong” is merely the first step. Next is apology and accountability followed by amends. It recognises that healing - not just legal resolution - must be at the heart of justice, treating both those harmed and those who caused it as whole human beings deserving of dignity.

Until we separate admission of error from institutional destruction, we will continue to incentivise the very cover-ups that erode public trust. I was recently struck by Baroness Onora O’Neill who insisted that we must demand trustworthiness in our leaders. We cannot have trustworthiness without truth-telling, and we cannot have that without valuing the act of repairing harm over reputation management. True authority comes from service, through vulnerability rather than invulnerability; strength comes through the acknowledgement of weakness not the projection of power.

We must recognise that those entrusted with power have a moral obligation to those they serve. That obligation transcends institutional self-interest. Thus, we must stop asking why leaders struggle to admit error and instead ask why we have made truth-telling so dangerous that lies seem safer.