Susan Hall told academics during a Greater London Authority meeting to “toughen up”, leading to a furious row in City Hall.
During a Police and Crime Committee (PCC) session, the leader of the Conservatives in the London Assembly asked the panel of experts about non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs), which the Metropolitan Police are no longer reporting after Father Ted creator Graham Linehan was cleared over social media posts.
Ms Hall, a prominent critic of “woke leftie” opinions, argued that due to a £260 million funding gap the Metropolitan Police no longer have the resources to investigate NCHIs.
She said: “And a bit controversially, I’ll ask you, do you think that some of us need to toughen up a little bit?”
Ms Hall added: “I get abused sometimes. Obviously I’m a Tory in London, but sometimes we get abused. To me it’s water under the bridge.”
She said that for some cases you could not ignore them, but that “life skills” should be taught “because people are awful to each other and some of us have to get on with it”.
Susan Hall told academics during a Greater London Authority meeting to ‘toughen up’
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GB NEWS
This led to a range of responses from a panel of experts, including from Dr David Wilkin, a criminologist at the Open University.
He added: “Perhaps toughening up was the same advice given to me when I was seven years of age when I had very strange mannerisms because of my autism.
“And I couldn’t toughen up, and I tried to commit suicide when I was 12.
“Not very successfully, as you can tell today.”
Susan Hall argued that the Metropolitan Police no longer have the resources to investigate NCHIs.
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GBNEWSMr Fearn, the co-executive director of Protection Approaches, a charity that addresses identity-based violence, said in response: “I can tell you absolutely, frankly, and honestly, the impacts on people of experiencing hate — even what might be considered low-level hate by some, such as verbal abuse in the street — the impacts are huge.”
Mr Fearn then said that the economic impacts are not understood at a wide level.
He said: “I think if you did a piece of work that understood the cost to London, of people not accessing well-being support and the harm to their well-being after experiencing a hate crime, it would be huge,” she said.
Marina Ahmad, Labour’s spokesman for policing and crime in the capital, condemed Ms Hall’s comments, saying: “Many of us were shocked at Susan Hall’s lack of empathy. Suggesting we teach victims of hate crime to ‘toughen up’ and ‘ignore’ what’s happening disregards the real pain and fear that so many Londoners experience.”
But defending her remarks, Ms Hall said told GB News: “I stand by my belief that we need to be more resilient in public spaces. As I said, when abuse verges into real crime of course it should be addressed and resolved. That is what policing is about.
“But we must also ask ourselves whether or not we have become too sensitive to certain things that we could otherwise brush aside, which do take police resources to address.”
According to a report by Transport for London (TfL), hate crimes rose by 27.8 per cent in the period January to August 2024 compared to the same period in 2023.
Mr Fearn claimed that research his organisation conducted showed that 90 per cent of hate crimes against East and South East Asians were not reported.