Racial and Religious Hatred Bill

My Lords, it is a pleasure to speak after the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford. I declare my support for the intention of the Bill, but I am very disturbed by it. I said so when we debated it in 2001 and my opinion remains the same. I was concerned then about how you would outlaw incitement to religious hatred without curbing freedom of speech. My noble friends Lord Ahmed and Lord Desai spoke about Jews and Sikhs having special privileges because they were both religions and ethnic groups. I said then that surely the answer is somehow to query the decision of the House of Lords and withdraw the religious element, not add other religions. However, I was told that this was not possible. Yet, the noble Lord, Lord Lester, seems to say that it is. Perhaps the Minister can explain. What I still find difficult to understand is how the law will now recognise that people’s actions and words are inciting religious hatred. My noble friend the Minister spoke about language, religious language. Religious language has been used to inflame hatred for centuries. Some may call it perversion. But others use texts from all the great faiths to justify hatred against other faiths and societies. Yet language is important. Faith communities have long understood that piety and spirituality flourish with debate and discussions. Like the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Southwell, it seems to me that the way to combat religious hate speech is by having more speech. This is one of the great strengths of Jewish jokes, and the Catholic jokes told by my noble friend Lady Kennedy. On the radio this morning Mr Goggins, the Minister in another place, said that the purpose of the Bill is to protect the believer. There are unreasonable elements in all religions. There are fundamentalists who claim rights from the Old Testament, from the New Testament and from the Koran, all in the name of faith. They are all pious people—believers—but even they have human anger, hatred and prejudice. No. Extremists of all faiths will see this Bill as an effort to protect them. A form of appeasement. Appeasement only undermines our justice system. For centuries this has been dealt with by many of the great religions by teaching that the law of the land is the law. Not the religious law. The noble Lord, Lord Roberts, emphasised that. We all have to yield to the law of the state. Once the state allows this to be questioned by religions, the state gets into difficulties. The noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, and the noble Earl, Lord Onslow, referred to some of the difficulties. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Cox, that we need to defend our liberal democracies, which work when citizens identify with the state as a whole and not only with those segments identified by their religion. So you do not deal with this fundamentalism by forbidding certain language to protect believers. The state should not even enter into the argument. You must insist that the law of the land is the law and that the law protects us all alike—Jews, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Hindus. Judging by the tone of the debate, perhaps I may suggest to the Minister that more understanding is required. The noble Lord, Lord Taylor, spoke of this. Earlier this year, researchers from the Metropolitan Police and the Institute for Jewish Policy Research—I declare an interest as its honorary president—were given access to official police statistics and crime reports in London from 2001–04. This was an attempt to understand more clearly the dynamics of anti-Semitic incidents as recorded by the police in London. This is not the time for me to go into details of the report but the Minister will be aware that it provided an improved understanding of the nature of anti-Semitic crime—a form of religious hatred—and this understanding is helping the police to tackle it better and to hold offenders to account. It seems to me that the lesson from this exercise is that before we have more laws to fight religious hatred we perhaps need more understanding, together with more effort to address it through existing legislation. As I understand it, Islamophobia occurs not because some people consciously oppose Islam as a religion but, rather, because by their dress and other aspects of their appearance many Muslims look ““different””, and that difference stimulates prejudice and stereotyping. The noble Baroness, Lady Flather, implied this. Indeed, in the first part of the 20th century, following large-scale Jewish immigration into Britain, the same could be said about many Jews. We have learnt that modern anti-Semitism has nothing to do with what Jews actually believe. The same can be said of anti-Muslim feeling. Many Muslims certainly suffer from the effects of prejudice and discrimination and the Government’s aim to tackle this is welcome. If there is a gap in the law, it can be filled by amending current legislation on incitement rather than by continuing along this path. Noble Lords have spoken about the need for religions to live together. I agree with Rabbi Tony Bayfield, who wrote recently that one of the big moral principles of the 21st century world is learning to live modestly and respectfully with others, with their stories and with their fragments of truth. I do not believe that the proposal in this legislation will help. It raises expectations about defending beliefs that cannot be fulfilled. The disappointment that the law is ineffective will only exacerbate the problem for all. Because the proposed Bill is so fraught with difficulties, I will find it hard to support it.