Racial and Religious Hatred Bill

My Lords, if it had been suggested some 50 or 60 years ago that in 2005 this House would be considering legislation about religious hatred, the idea would have been laughed to scorn. No one, it is fairly safe to say, would have identified this issue as one that would have been at the top of the agenda as we enter the 21st century. Insofar as ideologies troubled the face of the waters of politics then, it was the clash between, on the one hand, fascism and communism—two virulently anti-religious creeds—and, on the other, what could loosely be called western democracy. Although western democracies were largely composed of believers in one religious faith or another, those faiths played little if any direct role in political life, which was dominated by what can perhaps be termed secular humanism. As recently as 15 years ago, when communism followed fascism onto the rubbish heap of millenarian ideologies, there was hardly a hint that that secular humanism would not gradually emerge unchallenged as the prevalent approach of societies worldwide. How wrong we were. Little by little, and in an as yet patchy and uneven way, religion has moved back into politics; and, of more significance to our debate today, incitement to religious hatred as a source of violence, both nationally and internationally, has returned to plague a body politic like ours which, with the rather special exception of Northern Ireland, we had believed to be free of it long ago. In Japan, a religious sect resorted to terrorism using chemical weapons. In India, many died in religious-related violence. In Israel a Prime Minister committed to resolving one of the longest-running international disputes was assassinated by a religious fanatic who wished to prevent that; and then the present wave of terrorism, quite unjustifiably purporting to speak in the name of Islam, broke upon us. This is not something we can hope to ignore or to insulate ourselves from. The question we face is whether legislation against incitement to religious hatred and, accessorily, the violence which flows from it, is a proper and necessary, if only partial, response to these developments. We should certainly not seek to deny that this does involve some departure from one of our basic freedoms, freedom of speech. But there have been other, strictly limited, departures from that freedom, in the context of successive race relations Acts, for example. It does not seem to me unreasonable that when religion is actually being used, or rather misused, to stir up hatred and violence, then the state should enact measures designed to prevent that continuing. Will this legislation catch a large number of relatively harmless expressions of opinion on religious matters which it should be possible to discuss freely in any open society like ours? That will surely depend on the care and precision with which we legislate; and it must clearly be a central preoccupation at Committee stage of the Bill to avoid that. It is also argued that we really do not need this legislation: that what with blasphemy laws, and laws against racism and no doubt shortly laws against incitement to terrorism, we have quite enough instruments to deal with the challenges that face us. But this patchwork quilt approach to the problem hardly seems to me very convincing or at all even-handed. In particular, it leaves unanswered the concern that Islam and Muslims who are not fully covered by any of these instruments are thus being unfairly discriminated against. If we plan in future in any case to take a much tougher line against indirect incitement to terrorism by certain Muslim clerics, as I believe that we should do, that strengthens the case for Islam and the Muslims too to be protected directly against incitement to religious hatred. If we cannot legislate in a scrupulously even-handed way towards our Muslim compatriots, making it clear that they and we face the same laws and receive the same protection under those laws, how on earth are we to persuade them to work with us against this perverted and paranoiac ideology which has taken root in their midst? This question of discrimination, or of perceived discrimination, is a genuinely serious one, both nationally and internationally. It may seem a perfectly obvious and commonsense reaction to say that the threat that faces us is from Islamic fundamentalism and from Muslim terrorists. But these are heavily loaded words which give great offence to the majority of those whose religion is Islam and who are not fundamentalists and who will never be tempted into terrorism. It is not only that there is plenty of fundamentalism in this world of ours which is not Islam and plenty of terrorists who are not Muslims. It is also not by chance that the terrorists choose to label us as crusaders in all their public pronouncements and in their proselytising literature. The clash of civilisations is their tune; and it must not be ours. So we need to avoid loose talk and misleading labels which actually make it more difficult to enlist the co-operation of Muslims and of states where Islam is the prevalent faith to stamp out this evil of terrorism. By legislating even-handedly, we can make a small contribution to demonstrating that we have understood and sympathise with the complexities of this issue. One other trap we do need to avoid, and that is suggesting that legislation is in some way a quick fix to deal with an immediate and short-term problem. If we suggest that, we shall surely be disappointed because it will not have that effect. At best this will be a part, but only quite a small part, of an overall long-term strategy designed to counter the tendency towards alienation which has become apparent in recent times. I wish myself that we had legislated in the way proposed when the matter was first brought forward some time ago and not now in the heat of the moment when false linkages are all too likely to be drawn. But that was not to be. There is much talk now of turning away from multiculturalism. I believe that that would be a fundamental mistake. We may well need to become a little more hard-headed about the way we approach and apply multiculturalism, giving more weight to certain common elements and values that need to unite all citizens of this country and those who aspire to become citizens of it. But that is quite different from turning our backs on multiculturalism—from insisting that you have to abandon cultural diversity if you want to be British. To do that would indeed play into the hands of the extremists. One of the great attractions of this legislation—to me, at least—is that it takes a firmly multicultural approach to the problem of dealing with religious hatred. We may be forced to become intolerant towards religious hatred and the violence that it spawns, but we must not at the same time lose one of the inherited hallmarks of our society: tolerance towards cultures and creeds other than those of the majority of our citizens.