Racial and Religious Hatred Bill

After that, I had better keep within six minutes. I agree very much with what all those who have doubts about the Bill have said. I see it as something which will increase intolerance and frictions between religions. Nobody has identified a particular wrong—or set of wrongs—that we have to set right that is not covered by existing laws. The definitions are extremely unclear, except that—as the noble and learned Lord, the Lord Chancellor, pointed out—we will now count Scientology as a religion. Scientologists are an extremely litigious set of people, so being rude about them will now become very dangerous. As my noble friend Lord Pilkington pointed out, religions are, of their essence, controversial. They hold views which span the entire political spectrum—and, if one looks in history, they have gone in for practices some way beyond whatever has ordinarily been politically accepted. I do not think that religions, of themselves, justify state protection. Nor do I think that the protection as a filter of the noble and learned Lord, the Attorney-General, is one that we could or should accept. We are being asked to judge what is an essentially political crime. How can we accept a political personality as the one who filters whether, in an individual case, this is a crime? We have gone down this road before, and looking back I have grave doubts about whether making all of us criminals and then allowing a politician to decide whether we are prosecuted is the right way to proceed. It is certainly not in something which is so public a matter. I want to tackle a couple of remarks by the noble and learned Lord, the Lord Chancellor. He said that the Bill is about stirring up hatred against people, not beliefs. Again, he said in response to the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, when discussing the new regulations about hate preachers that it is not because of their religion, but because they stir up hatred. This implies that we can make a distinction between a religion and its believers. We can do that in words, where it works wonderfully: I am sure we would all get an A-star if we had it as a GCSE question. But in the practical world where the Bill will operate, there is no distinction. We see this with absolute clarity when considering the case of a powerful God and a strong, well-defined religion that has no believers anywhere. Now, that God has no power; there is no religion with which we can interact. If such a God acquires a believer, that God’s power depends on that believer. If he chooses Mohammed, he does pretty well. If he chooses a retired chartered accountant in Wimbledon, he is not going to get so far. Escalating that, we come to see that the only way in which an individual human being outside a religion can react with it is through the individual believers and their collective belief. That constitutes the religion. There may be a God of the Christians: I do not know. He may be the same God as the God of Islam and the God of the Jews, but how can I see him? All I see is an enormous spread of beliefs and arguments, stretching back through centuries, but giving me no clear idea of what the God or the religion is—merely what people have believed about him from time to time. So if I say something harsh about a religion, if I were to use intemperate language about, say, the Catholic view of contraception and the harm it does in the world, I would expect that the noble Lord, Lord Alton, would feel that as a blow because I am getting at his beliefs. His religion is part of him and he is part of that religion. That is the way that it appears from outside. I can see it as no other. So to say that there is some way in which I can have a dialogue with a religion, that I can be as intemperate and hard as I like about a religion, and not be speaking against and hurting people who are of that religion is ridiculous. It cannot be so. We are effectively requiring people to be temperate and reasonable in all their transactions with religions and religious people. That is really saying that the whole world should behave like the House of Lords. That must be a good thing, but I do not think it is reasonable or proper. The Bill is a mess. I very much hope that through the wisdom of the many people who are taking an interest in it we will be able to sort it out to the satisfaction of ourselves and of the Government. I look forward to tomorrow, to a day when I will be able to go home at a reasonable hour. I shall sit down with my daughter and watch an old movie. It will feature two people, one large and one slimmer. At some point in the film, the large one will turn to the slim one and say, ““That’s another fine mess you’ve got us into, Tony””. That is what I feel about the Bill. It is up to us to get us out of the mess.