Racial and Religious Hatred Bill

My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, and the noble Lord, Lord Lester. While I align myself with them in agreeing with the Lord Chancellor that the aims of the Bill are laudable, I also agree with them that it is liable to have unacceptable consequences. If I may say so as non-lawyer, what the Lord Chancellor described as the ““narrow gap”” that should be filled seems to me, as I try to understand the matters, narrower than can be filled and the filling of it is likely to be very dangerous and to have a series of unacceptable consequences. The more I prepared for this debate, the more surprised I became that this Bill can be proposed at all in this form by those who carefully read—I am sure that its proposers have read it—the report of the Select Committee on Religious Offences 2003 and the debate on the Take Note Motion in your Lordships’ House on 22 April last year. Among the speeches on that occasion, I remember in particular that of the committee’s chairman, the noble Viscount, Lord Colville of Culross. The noble Lord, Lord Lester, has already quoted from that report the remarks of the Mr Sarabjee, the then Indian Attorney-General, and I will not repeat them, but they were one of many powerful notes in that report. Before I go on, I think that your Lordships would want me to note the absence from the House through most regrettable illness of our friend, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Portsmouth, who was a member of that Select Committee. I anticipate that the House would want to send him its good wishes and its trust that he will soon be back on his feet and in good voice among us. It seemed to me prudent to take the opportunity to discuss the questions in this Bill with a friend and neighbour in Hampshire who is a distinguished Muslim lawyer and an adviser of the Muslim Council of Britain, but I was still not persuaded that the Bill was not likely to raise expectations among Muslim communities which the Government would regret having raised when they were not able to meet them. It seems to me—this point was made by the noble Lord, Lord Lester, and I am not going to do more than mention it—that the Bill places the Attorney-General of the time in a most undesirable position of great complexity and pressure. If passed in anything like its present form, it will lead almost certainly to self-censorship on many fronts. The Church of England had ample experience in the last third of the nineteenth century of the taking of religious matters and religious communities to the courts. Neither the courts nor the Government, nor the faith communities, I submit, should be taking the risk that this Bill takes of placing the courts in positions of adjudication in matters of religion. So I find myself, with many Christian groups and with many of our secular groups—poets, writers, academics, comedians and a range of people—very concerned indeed about this Bill as it stands. On the Bill itself and its Explanatory Notes, it seems to me that Clause 3(3)—the powers for the Secretary of State in connection with the coming into force of the Bill—is deplorably widely drawn, especially in the kinds of circumstances in which we find ourselves today, to which the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Wirral, referred earlier. These are not situations in which it is appropriate for Ministers of the Crown to have that kind of latitude. It is most unwise that they should want it and that they should receive it at a time when more than one faith community is feeling under pressure in this society and culture. I also wonder whether it is wise for this Bill to be brought forward in Ramadan. There are details in the schedule, to which reference has already been made, that seem to me to be stacked with potential for trouble, including the recurrent words ““likely”” and ““any””. In the terrorism Bill, published yesterday, it is noticeable that the drafting is a great deal tighter and less sweeping than the drafting in this Bill. Of course, it is the case, as the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor said earlier, that sharply, strongly expressed disagreement, ridicule or criticism, however painful to religious believers and others, is generally not hatred. With words such as ““likely”” and ““any”” in the Bill, it seems that it will be extremely difficult for the distinction, which he sought to draw, between people and faith to be upheld among those who might hope that they can make use of this Bill. I believe that it is much more likely to attract would-be martyrs of various sorts and that it will not achieve the ends that it seeks to achieve. As I understand it as a non-lawyer, the powers available in a range of statutes are sufficient to deal with what the Government, at certain points justifiably and at certain points questionably, judge they need to do. The really critical matters are care, respect, interpretive charity, learning to express disagreement within friendship and appreciation. I judge that this Bill, unless it is radically amended so as to change its character, will damage those matters rather than the system.