The Prime Minister-in-waiting has given his verdict on the recent court case involving BNP leader Nick Griffin: he has called for changes to the law.

Griffin and co-defendant Mark Collett were charged in 2005 with inciting racial hatred following the broadcast of secretly-filmed footage of the pair by the BBC. After the first trial failed to reach a verdict, the fresh retrial has found the men not guilty.

Nick Griffin and his party are odious fear-mongers. Most British people agree that they are odious fear-mongers and, aside from a few pockets of discontent, their party receives very little support. Much of the support they do receive has been generated on the back of the publicity surrounding the trial.

So would a new law have made things any better? I doubt it. Incarcerating Nick Griffin for his views is exactly what the BNP would want; it would give a real boost to their claim that the current government is repressing the BNP's views, and would make valuable propaganda. Not only that, but there comes a point at which we have to accept that some people simply have odious views which we can do nothing about. Brown's exact quote is revealing:

"Any preaching of religious or racial hatred will offend mainstream opinion in this country.

"We have got to do whatever we can to root it out from whatever quarter it comes.

"And if that means we have got to look at the laws again, we will have to do so."

He's right to say that preaching of hate offends mainstream opinion. It certainly offends mine. But is that a justification for a law against it? I'm not convinced. I do, of course, have to recognise that I am not the target of Nick Griffin's hatred and, if I were, I might feel differently. But even that consideration leaves plenty of unanswered questions. Can we ever criminalise 'hatred'? I'm really not sure that we can, and that the use of the law to control hatred may be a mistake. Hatred is a state of mind, not a practice. It cannot be outlawed like smoking, or fox-hunting. A society demonstrates its willingness to confront hatred in other ways than by passing laws. In particular, we can defeat Nick Griffin's ideology by voting against it at the ballot box.

What's more, Brown is giving credence to the idea that any crackpot demagogue can become a real threat to the lives and liberties of British citizens purely on the basis of their ethnicity. Britain ought to be a country made of better stuff than to allow such a thing to happen. We should not need to silence Nick Griffin by force of law; let him say what he wants, and be publicly rejected for it. If we want to guarantee the liberty of British citizens, we could start by promoting those liberties and protecting them in law - that would be a better guarantee of protection against a future fascist government than trying to criminalise those who fantasise about such a government's rise.

Brown's views seem to build on the 'managerialist' view of government (take a browse through Chris Dillow's many excellent posts on the subject); that every problem must be rectified by government action, whether the passing of laws, the changing of tax structures or the spending of money. His policy suggestions are based on using the law to control individuals, rather than on strengthening society and institutions necessary to tackle the problem. If the problem is disenfranchised white communities voting BNP, the solution is to address the genuine causes of discontent in those communities. If the problem is fear amongst ethnic minorities, the solution is to strengthen and guarantee their rights as British citizens, so that no amount of 'send them back' rhetoric from the BNP can ever be taken seriously. I'd prefer to see a Britain where ethnic minority Britons are able to laugh in the face of the BNP and where no community feels so excluded from society as to fall prey to demagogues. That is the real goal, not the temporary silencing of uncomfortable or offensive views.

The BBC are reporting that police chiefs are 'urging' the government to make flag-burning a criminal offence. They claim that this will form a necessary part of a 'crack down on Islamic extremists and others preaching violence and religious hate'.

There are numerous problems with this suggestion. Firstly, is flag-burning such a problem? How many incidents of flag-burning have there been in the last five years? The BBC piece gives no figures and I can't recall the last time I saw pictures of flags burning on TV or in the newspapers. Whilst that's not a scientific study, it does rather suggest that the problem is being overblown.

Secondly, who does flag-burning actually harm? A flag is just another piece of property which an owner can do with as they please. Setting fire to things in a public place may be dangerous, but surely this is covered by existing laws? When this is considered, it becomes apparent that this is just another proposal designed to 'send a message' rather than actually achieve anything. It addresses a symptom, rather than the cause of the problem. Flag-burning is, in itself, an irrelevance; if a person has done nothing worse than burn a flag, then they really do not deserve punishment. If they have done worse than burn a flag, then we need to be asking why such people are at liberty to do so. Arresting people for flag-burning makes it look like the police are 'doing something' without any clear indication of how this is of benefit to anyone.

There is a further problem; flag-burning is a very public demonstration of hatred. Is suppressing such expressions really such a good idea? Visual images are very powerful, and as a person who believes in peaceful, reasonable discourse I would find it quite useful for flag-burning to be allowed; it would make it very easy for me to identify precisely who the hateful bigots are. Suppressing the expression of hatred simply forces the 'preachers of hate' to put their message forward in a different way, perhaps a way less easy to observe.

Thirdly, most people know that flag-burning is wrong. They know that people burning flags are people who are not interested in rational discourse. Why not trust people to deal with the sight of burning flags for themselves?

Finally, making flag-burning illegal provides a very simple means by which any protester can provoke the police into making a forced arrest in a dangerous situation. Once such a law is passed, the police will not be able to exercise restraint against a group of people burning a flag; they will have to wade in, in full riot gear, into a situation involving a group of people and burning objects. The risk of injury is high, and for what benefit? If we truly wished to treat flag-burning with the contempt it deserves, we would ignore it as the childish behaviour that it is.