It may sound ridiculous, but in England, a politician, Nick Griffin, was charged with a "race hate crime" for calling islam a "wicked, vicious faith." "Hate crime" legislation is a menace.
And the British statutes you refer to involve hate speech laws, not hate crime laws. If that's what the article meant to say, then that's different, but a hate crime law as understood in the American legal system is a law that increases the sentence for something that is already a crime, due to the motivation of hate for a group protected by the statute. A hate speech law criminalizes the speech itself, regardless of whether any crime has been committed.