Of insults and double-standards
At risk of being shot down by pedants, I thought "bloody" was a corruption of "by our lady" - an expression of veracity in the best High Church tradition. In which case, "bloody foreigners" means "really, truly foreigners" which seems appropriate when applied to Spanish people in the UK, as it would UK citizens in Spain.
Perhaps its being a "foreigner" which is offensive ;)
If he was abusive, waving his walking stick threateningly, fine - convict him for that. Criminalisation based on particular thoughts is absurd. How can stealing someone's handbag because they have a large nose be less evil than stealing it because they were born outside of your area? Convict on the act of theft - leave the posturing and inevitable double-standards out of it.
Taking Hale's assertion that xenophobia and racism are the targets of the laws attempting to criminalise the demeaning of people as "other", I would suggest that any insult does this. How many insults are hurled which include the speaker in the target? To suggest that the "simple" insults don't divide people is ridiculous.
Taking the moral high-ground as defending against xenophobia and the hurtful name-calling of foreigners is also rather rich coming from the government. Are you out-of-work with a baby, deserted by your baby's father? Here's a house and some money to buy food. What? You weren't born locally to the right parents and you don't have the right identity papers? Not only will we tell you to "go home, foreigner", we'll frogmarch you onto a plane to make sure you go back to your poverty-stricken, disease-ridden foreign land. Maybe we'll even spend billions trying to electronically track the entire populace and blame "foreigners" for having to do it!
I'm so glad *we* don't have a racist government!