Racial and Religious Hatred Bill

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Keighley (Mrs. Cryer). I commend her on what I thought was a remarkably thoughtful and major contribution. I welcome her to the debate on the Bill. Consideration of the Bill in Committee was a pleasure, principally because of the good humoured way in which the Minister handled the proceedings. It is often said that the Government are leading us into a nanny state. I suspect that there may be some truth in that, and I suspect also that we have in the Minister a new Labour Mary Poppins. He is the man who provides the spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down. However, what he has provided us with in the Bill remains a pretty unpalatable medicine. It remains a medicine that is in search of an ill to cure. As I understood the Minister on Report, he seems to be telling us that the Government are bringing forward this legislation and insisting on it because they have a wish to address a perceived anomaly in the treatment of Jews and Sikhs under existing legislation, and other religious groups. At the same time, he accepted that the nature of that cover was such that other groups were already covered to the same extent by existing legislation. Perhaps it was not intellectually the Minister’s finest hour, if I might put it like that. An interesting feature of the Minister’s speech was his offer to provide draft guidance on good practice that would be used to implement the Bill’s provisions. I welcome that. Such guidance will be useful. However, I wonder why we are hearing about guidance at this stage. What was the rush in introducing the Bill? Why have we had Second Reading, consideration in Committee followed by consideration on Report in such a short compass when we are in an 18-month Session? If the guidance is to be made available, surely it should have been provided to us at a time when we could have made proper use of it. The guidance might well have answered many of the objections that have been raised. We do not know because the refusal to publish it so far means that, effectively, the Government are asking us to buy a pig in a poke. I am embarrassed that we are sending forward a Bill that is so bad even after we have spent so much time on it. I accept what the Minister says that whatever faults there have been in the Government’s approach to this proposed legislation, lack of time has not been one of them. I suggest, however, that the Bill is ill-conceived in its thinking. It will be dangerous in its execution and I am confident that we have not seen the last of it. We, the elected House, should not be relying on the other place to give the Bill the sort of scrutiny and the sort of amendment that it so clearly requires. Come the vote on Third Reading, Liberal Democrat Members will be voting against it.