Racial and Religious Hatred Bill

My Lords, as one of the authors of the amendment, I should like to say a brief word in its favour. As the noble Lords, Lord Avebury and Lord Lester, have pointed out, the social basis of the blasphemy laws has been entirely eroded. They developed as a common law offence to protect religious belief when it was thought that religious belief, particularly Christian belief, was part of the essential social glue, underpinning the law and the monarchy. Whatever the social glue of a modern society is, it is not generated purely by one religion or one denomination. It seems clear that the doctrines and formulae of the Church of England are given special treatment under the blasphemy laws, so the social basis of the laws has been eroded. There are three important arguments, particularly given what my noble friend Lord Clinton-Davis said about whether this was relevant to the Bill. If, as the noble Lord, Lord Lester, said, we go back to the Gay News trial, Lord Scarman argued that the blasphemy laws, or something like them, should be extended to cover all other religions. The danger is that the Bill will be seen by many people as doing that; it is not what the Government or Parliament intend, but a lot of people think that that is what is being done. To remove or rescind the blasphemy laws would make it crystal clear that we were not following Lord Scarman’s injunction of extending the blasphemy laws to all other religions. Secondly, abolition would clarify the nature of the Bill. The Government have argued that it is not an extension of the blasphemy laws but there is little doubt that some Muslim leaders have thought that that is what they are going to get. The abolition of the blasphemy laws would make it crystal clear that that is not the case and would therefore clarify the nature of the Bill. I support the amendment because I think it makes the nature of the Bill much clearer. Finally, the Government have argued all along that the Bill as it was first conceived, and still to a very large extent as amended, draws a distinction between belief and believers. For the reasons I gave at Second Reading, that is not a distinction I find very convincing; nevertheless, it is what the Bill turns on. Given that, the blasphemy laws protect beliefs and not believers. Therefore, we would have two pieces of protective religious legislation on the statute book—the Bill, if it becomes an Act, and the blasphemy laws—both embodying contradictory principles. The Bill emphasises the distinction between belief and believer and protects the believer, not the belief. The blasphemy laws protect the belief and, via the Bill, would also protect the believer. However, the blasphemy laws in themselves protect the belief. It would clarify the nature of the Bill and the distinction between beliefs and believer to accept this amendment. It would not do, as a way of trying to resist the amendment, to say that the Human Rights Act has made all this irrelevant, otiose or redundant. If it is redundant, we might as well get rid of it because it gives us too many reasons for people to be dissatisfied by what they think of as unequal treatment before the law, depending on which their religious beliefs. For those reasons, I put my name to the amendment. Unlike my noble friend Lord Clinton-Davis, I think that it is central to clarifying the nature of this Bill.