Racial and Religious Hatred Bill

My Lords, after the events of 9/11, it became a cliché to say that the world had changed. After 7 July we said that Britain had changed and that nothing would ever be the same again. Soon most, but not all, of us returned to living as normal and thinking as normal. It was comforting to believe that the resumption of the commonplace rituals of daily life was evidence of a return to normality and that the terrorist acts were an aberration. But the world has changed and Britain has changed. Those terrible events did not alone engender that change, but they were cataclysmic moments that both exemplified a different world and hastened that new world into being. As Jonathan Sachs has written:"““Something has changed in the human condition. Our power for good and evil, the sheer reach and consequence of our interventions””." They have changed. He continued:"““We have come face to face with the stranger and it makes all the difference whether we find this threatening or enlarging””." Last July we came face to face with the stranger. How we deal with that stranger, how we cope with the huge scale of new political and social challenges, will shape our future for years to come. That is why the Bill is so important. What has worked in the past may not and probably will not work in the future. We need new signposts, new insights and a new map. At the heart of that change is a paradox: 9/11 and 7/7 were global events that used global media and global technology. But they were also evidence of, I accept, an extreme and mutated form of a new kind of politics—a politics of identity, of belonging, of religion, of culture and of ethnicity. That politics of identity will be etched into our political landscape for decades. It will change the way we view politics and the way we respond. This is a challenge to our society and to our nation, but most of all to our own assumptions. The test for us is not just that we have the courage to confront others, because I know we can do that, but whether we have the courage to confront ourselves. It is easy to be a shrill voice for liberty, security or integration, but it is hard to see how those great values can work in harmony so that in this new world we mix decency with fairness, security with liberalism and form a lasting balance. The public sense that the ground has changed and that old preconceptions and sterile antagonisms will not meet the scale of the task that we now face. It sees security, liberty and inclusiveness not as antagonistic alternatives but as interconnected parts of a new and mature solution. The public is collapsing old boundaries and is finding a new map. The Bill goes to the heart of the new politics. I am not saying that it can solve all the problems at a stroke, but it does grapple with these issues without flinching. In seeking the right solution, it is not frightened to offend and that is why the Bill has my support. Of course many people look at the Bill and are concerned about freedom of speech. They are part of an honourable liberal tradition. If the Bill silences criticism of religion in any way, of course it fails. But as liberals we have to ask as well: what about freedom of speech in a cold, wet car park late into the night when a Muslim youth is surrounded by a gang of racist thugs hatefully abusing him because of who he is and the religion he believes in? What about his civil liberties? This is a real, tangible, obscene curtailment of a basic liberty and this is happening—