Racial and Religious Hatred Bill

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, has underlined the fact that we have discussed this proposal four times. I make no apology for intervening in the debate, because—like the noble Lord, Lord Wedderburn—I feel an attack of conscience coming on. But my conscience tells me that the Government are right and that my party is wrong. I feel that I have to explain why; otherwise people might think that I was simply being frivolous in opposing my party just for some trivial purpose. I believe that the enactment of a law on incitement to religious hatred is vital and I would ask your Lordships who disagree with that proposition to look at what was said before the Select Committee on Religious Offences. I am dismayed that neither on Second Reading nor on this occasion nor any other time that this matter has been looked at recently has anyone bothered to refer to the Select Committee. It is as though it never existed, and yet the matter was thoroughly canvassed there. We had evidence from the police, the Director of Public Prosecutions and the Attorney-General showing why a law of this sort was necessary. I would refer your Lordships in particular to what was said by the police about the riots in Bolton when the extreme right had very good legal advice and were distributing documents. I refer the noble Lord, Lord Wedderburn, to that. I hope that he has had a chance to look at what was said and to look at the pictures of the documents which were displayed in the Select Committee’s report. There is no doubt that this is a way in which the extreme right is escaping from the consequences of the existing law on incitement to racial hatred, by disguising itself as attacking its victims because of their religious beliefs. Therefore it is necessary, vitally necessary, that we should have this legislation. When the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Swynnerton, says he believes that the legislation will inhibit freedom of speech—we have heard a lot of that this afternoon, as we did the other day—he is talking rubbish. This Bill does not override the Human Rights Act. A much better lawyer than I am—the noble Viscount, Lord Colville of Culross, who is the chair of the Select Committee—guided our committee into pointing out that what we are looking at here is a very narrow range of conduct. It is no good the noble Lord, Lord Wedderburn, shaking his head. This was one of the few matters on which the Select Committee was agreed. On the one hand we have Article 10 of the Human Rights Act: it circumscribes this offence because nothing which is permissible under the Human Rights Act would be an offence under this Bill. On the other side we have the law on incitement, both the common law which makes it a criminal offence to incite someone to commit a criminal offence, and then a variety of statute law such as the Offences Against the Person Act 1860, which was in fact recently used in a very interesting case which I have mentioned before. It was the case of a preacher who incited his congregation to go out and kill Jews, Hindus and Americans. The preacher made the mistake of recording his sermons—if you can call them that—and sold them outside the mosque, so the Special Branch was able to buy copies and use them for the prosecution. The interesting thing about that case was that the man got seven years under the Offences Against the Person Act, but was given an additional two years for incitement to racial hatred. Your Lordships will appreciate that if he had chosen other groups to attack, and had said Christians rather than Jews, the extra two years could not have been awarded by the court. That illustrates how stupid the law is.