Racial and Religious Hatred Bill

I am grateful to the Minister for that intervention, but I believe that there is a clear distinction between race and religion. Race is immutable and, on any consensus view, a very poor foundation on which any intelligent person could make a distinction about someone’s other characteristics. Religion, on the other hand, relates very strongly to a person’s personal characteristics and views. The Attorney-General will therefore face a much harder task in regard to decisions on religious hatred than he does on racial hatred. That seems to be reflected by the fact that the Minister has suggested publicly that the level of prosecutions on religious hatred will be far lower even than that of prosecutions on racial hatred in the past few years.