Racial and Religious Hatred Bill

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Desai, said that it was a privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky. I think that it is a privilege to follow both the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, and the noble Lord, Lord Desai. I was extremely interested to hear what the noble Lord, Lord Desai, said on the concept of monotheism, because I was going to start with the following quote:"““The modes of religion in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false, and by the magistrate as equally useful””." So wrote the great Gibbon of ““Decline and Fall”” fame. That happy state of affairs was brought to an abrupt end by the establishment of Christianity in the West as the official religion of the western world. Monotheism states that all other creeds are wrong, and therefore can or even must be rooted out. It follows also that sections of monotheism fight like alley cats. You have only to see the difference between various sections of the Wee Frees in Scotland who hate each other almost more than they hate the Muslims. One has only to think of the number of people whom Philip II burnt in the Grande Place in Brussels—reputedly rather more than were killed by the whole of the Roman persecutions of Christianity. This has produced an intolerance. Of the three Abrahamic religions, interestingly enough, two are universal and multi-ethnic and one is not. So it is impossible to persuade one that you are the same race if you are a Muslim from Dahomey in north Africa, from Bosnia, from Turkey, Persia or Kashmir. They are all, obviously, of different ethnic make-up. So we cannot make that confusion. Moreover, in some of these religions it is right to hate what they represent. It is right to hate the persecution of the Irish Catholics by the English Protestants in the 16th century. It is right to hate the persecution of the Jews and Moors by Ferdinand and Isabella, as it is right to admire the tolerance of the Muslims in north Africa who greeted and allowed the Jews to settle there from the persecutions. It is right to hate the papacy for the Albigensian crusade. It is right to hate the doctrine of the Church of Rome towards birth control, whose consequences are that it discourages the impeding of the spread of AIDS, encourages the exploitation of women and makes more difficult the progress of population control. I think that it is right to hate the Muslim assertion that a woman’s witness is worth only two-thirds of a man’s. I know it is wrong that women should be hanged as teenagers for sexual misdemeanours in Persia in the name of Shia Islam. That is something that it is totally right to hate. I am not totally sure that I like the idea of having imposed upon me a universal Caliphate. I am not sure that I really like one of the beliefs of the descendants of someone who may have existed 3,000 years ago, or so it was rumoured 600 years later. Apparently he was promised by God when in his dotage that if he changed the spelling of his and his wife’s name and circumcised himself and all his 10,000 slaves, he would have children who could nick the best piece of real estate in the eastern Mediterranean with the same God’s approval. That is Genesis 17, only not in the language of King James. There are many more hateful aspects of monotheism that it is right to hate, and why should I not say so? Furthermore, there are west African religions that involve witchcraft ceremonies that introduce the murder and mutilation of children. Am I not allowed to hate that? How is incitement to religious hatred to be legally defined? The noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, asked that. The great Edward Gibbon, to whom I must return, aroused great hatred among the religious establishment of his day. He wrote of John XII:"““But we read with some surprise . . . that the Lateran palace turned into a school for prostitution and that his rapes of virgins and widows had deterred the female pilgrims from visiting the tomb of St Peter lest in the devout act they should be violated by his successor””." He said of Pope John XXIII:"““The most scandalous charges were suppressed. The Vicar of Christ was only accused of piracy, murder, rape, sodomy and incest””." Is the following little gem of a footnote to be criminalized? According to Abufelda, Ali, who washed the Prophet’s body, proclaimed:"““O propheta certa penis tuus coelum versus erectus erat””," only he said it in Arabic, not in Latin. Those quotes showed his ironic attitude to Christianity and to religion as a whole and they drew down upon him the hatred of the Church. This Government have form on suppressing ancient liberties. The Prime Minister, in his speech at the    Labour conference, seemed to question the importance and the essentiality of not convicting the innocent if it impeded the conviction of the guilty. There have been countless anti-terrorism Acts, some whose provisions your Lordships have been able to make less illiberal. There is a new police force who owes its loyalty to the Home Secretary and not to the Crown. There comes over the horizon the Identity Cards Bill, of whose purpose the Government are unsure and the cost of which they are ignorant. There are powers in the Civil Contingencies Act which no modern government should have if they call themselves a government of a free people. They are a Government careless of our liberties. This Bill takes away more of our rights of free thought and free speech. I hope that your Lordships will continue your established role as constitutional watchdogs and at least attempt to tame some of the more unpleasant aspects.