Racial and Religious Hatred Bill

I shall keep well within the constraints of the Companion. I wish to make one point, in supplement to the extremely able and eloquent case advanced by the two noble Lords whose names are on the amendment. I speak about the possible chilling effect of the legislation. Sympathetic though I am in some respects to the intentions behind the proposed new law, I believe that it could easily have a rebound effect and create more resentment than enlightenment on the part of the public. I shall add just this: we in this House and in the other place have legislated a deluge of new law over the past few years, including 14,000 pages last year. Without question, there is in the country a combination of bemusement and resentment about the quantity and complexity of that law. I shall detain noble Lords with one short example of how new law can be seriously misconstrued and in the process create antipathies that it certainly was not intended to create. My daughter has just enrolled her two and a half year-old son in a nursery, where she was asked to sign a disclaimer against what she was told was the current law of the land, which will allow those who run the nursery to pick up the two and a half year-old if he falls down and hurts himself. Without that signature and that disclaimer, the staff of the nursery maintained that they would be acting unlawfully. In fact, they are wrong—but I put it to you that this new law is a classic of the sort that will be misrepresented in the public bars the length and breadth of England. Far from achieving the meritorious purposes behind it, it will stand in danger of achieving a chilling effect that will in turn create resentments that currently do not exist, exacerbate tensions that do exist and hence, in toto, be counter-productive.