Britain's police are treating Home Secretary Amber Rudd's foreign workers speech as a 'hate incident'

LONDON - Home Secretary Amber Rudd's party conference speech about foreign workers is being treated as a "hate incident" by police.

Joshua Silver, a physics professor at the University of Oxford, reported Rudd to West Midland's police after she spoke about bringing in new rules to ensure immigrant workers are "not taking jobs British people could do."

Silver told The Times that Rudd's comments were an example of "hate speech."

"I felt politicians have been using hate speech to turn Britons against foreigners, and I thought that is probably not lawful," Professor Silver said.

After investigating the comments, police decided they were an example of a "non-crime hate incident."

Under police guidelines brought in by Rudd's own government, comments must be automatically recorded as a hate incident "if the victim or anyone else thinks it was motivated by hostility or prejudice."

A Home Office spokesperson said: "This was not a hate crime."