Hate Crimes? Thought Crimes? Crimethink?

This isn't quite right. You're correct about the motivation behind the introduction of racially aggravated offences, as the justifications offered in Parliament were mostly about 'sending a message'. However, hate crimes are not just an aggravating factor - the Crime and Disorder Act (1998) created new offences for racially motivated crimes. There's a long debate on the topic from the House of Lords in 1998 here on Hansard. I haven't read the whole thing, but the main argument as to why to create a new offence rather than rely on treating racial motivation simply as an aggravating factor (which had been done in the UK long before 1998), other than simply 'to send a message', was offered by Lord Ackner:

quote:

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By relying upon the racial motivation purely as an aggravating aspect, it becomes merely part of the background and not part of the offence itself. Moreover, as part of the background, it may hardly emerge at all during the trial of the substantive offence. When it does emerge relative to sentencing, there may be the complication of an issue as to the seriousness arising therefrom. By making it a separate offence, it would be the members of the jury who would make all the relevant findings; by keeping it merely as aggravation, you are mixing up the functions of the judge and the jury. I assume that the Government take the view that, in the particular circumstances, that is not the desirable way of dealing with the matter.

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Yes. It's not called 'the first amendment', obviously, but almost every modern democratic country has freedom of speech enshrined in their constitution. And yet some of these countries, such as France since 1990, also have laws against hate speech.The French Constitutional Court has, for reasons I might understand better if I spoke French, confirmed that laws against hate speech and against Holocaust denial do not violate the constitution. The same court, however, ruled that the 2012 law criminalising denial of the Armenian Genocide is unconstitutional on free speech grounds. Make of that what you will.

If you have a guarantee of freedom of speech enshrined in your constutition, you have something exactly like the first amendment, because that's what the first amendment is. Sure, they all may be worded slightly differently, but it's worth noting that the justification offered that British laws against incitement to racial hatred do not contravene the European Convention of Human Rights is exactly that same as that used by the US Supreme Court to uphold the constitutionality of the Espionage and Sedition acts during the first world war.