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The police and Crown Prosecution Service must take a tough line over "preachers of violent hate", but not waste public money targeting abusive neighbours, Nick Herbert, the Shadow Justice Secretary, has urged.

The Conservative front-bench spokesman delivered a defence of the controversial "hate crime" legislation, saying that it could regulate behaviour.

But he told the annual Bar Conference: "We must guard against a culture that allows criminal justice agencies to pursue easy targets while simultaneously allowing preachers of hate to call for the stoning of gay people in their sermons."

Clumsy enforcement had undermined public and media support for hate crime laws, he added. "They have rightly made Parlaiment more cautious about extending the ambit of the criminal law.

"They have almost certainly also damaged the interests of the minorities which hate crime laws were meant to protect."

Mr Herbert told barristers at the annual Bar conference in London that there was criticism on both the left and the right of the political spectrum over "hate crime" legislation with some commentators arguing that it was an "Orwellian response to prejudice".

Criticisms that the law was an attempt to legislate for people's thoughts and values were serious points, he said. But while legislation might not change attitudes, it could change behaviour.

Hate crime did single out special groups for treatment but it was not because they were gay, black, disabled or Muslim; it was because the were the victim of a particular type of crime — an assault because of being gay, for instance.

Such attacks made victims of the whole community. "When a young black man is beaten up by racist thugs or a Muslim family's home is daubed with Islamophobic graffiti or a young gay man kicked to death on Clapham Common . . . the effect on their respective communities is far more pronounced."

Mr Herbert, who is openly gay, said that "while I don't visit Clapham Common, my fear was enhanced by that case [the murder of the man]".

Yet public money must be carefully targeted and not be wasted on "poliltically-correct pursuit of neighbours who engage in tasteless insults," he said.

Hate crime, first introduced in the Criminal Justice Act 2003 and then extended in the Religious and Racial Hatred Act 2006, was not intended to subject "harmless abuse" to criminal sanction, he said.

The response of the police and prosecutors mut be proportionate and "target the criminal, not just the immoral or the unpleasant".

"People who set out their views about gay practices in a temperate way might still cause offence, as might those who call Irishmen leprechauns, but such comment is not criminal and should not attract heavy-handed policing, still less prosecution."

Hate crime, he added, had a purpose in sending out a signal that certain views and values were anathema to civilised society and that harmful actions emerging from those views would not be tolerated.

But legislation was not the only or even primary means of governing public morality. Law making, however much it might send a signal, could not be the sole driver of social change. "Legislation cannot make windows into men's souls."

Mr Herbert said that a poll in The Observer last week had found that 24 per cent of the public thought gay sex should be illegal. He said: "Eight years after the age of consent was equalised, and three years after civil partnerships were introduced, a quarter of the British public want to reverse these changes and take us back to the situation that existed before the Sexual Offences Act 1967. "

But that did not argue for more laws, he said. "Ultimately it is only by fostering a shared feeling of resonsibility that we can promote a tolerant society where people are considerate towards others and their feelings and where they exercise judgment in what they do."

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