Racial and Religious Hatred Bill

My Lords, I nearly put my name to this amendment, but, through a failure of timing, it does not appear. The crime of blasphemy, in its medieval origin, is very understandable, but it has shrunk, should shrink further, and should be disposed of by your Lordships, if necessary, today. Of course, I quite understand the argument which Professor Francis Cornford called the principle of unripe time in his little book, Microcosmographia Academica, which was written for fellows of a particular college who engaged in academic politics. He suggested that such readers, when met by the principle that the time is not ripe, should say, ““That is to say that the just and right thing should not be done now for fear of doing more just and right things in the immediate future””. For all the reasons given by my noble friend Lord Plant, it is plainly appropriate and sensible to deal with this matter in this Bill. Very little has been said, except by the noble Lord, Lord Lester, about the nature of blasphemy. It began as a denial of the truth of the Christian religion, the Bible, The Book of Common Prayer or the existence of God—I summarise from the best textbook. That was understandable as a medieval offence, but everybody felt uncomfortable with it as the 19th century began to edge out that summary of the cases between 1514 and 1841. The courts began to say that the offence was not quite just because it was a manifest block on sensible freedom of discussion, a concept that the 19th century began gradually to understand. They came to say that it was such a thing only if it led to a risk of breach of the peace. Lord Sumner said judicially that blasphemous words were punishable,"““for their manner, their violence, or ribaldry, or, more fully stated, for their tendency to endanger the peace, then and there, to deprave public morality generally, to shake the fabric of society and to be a cause of civil strife””." Of course, there are plenty of other crimes that punish people for causing civil strife or the like. Those words were said in 1917, but that was not an easy position to maintain. So we come to the modern cases, where they tend to say—again, this is a summary—that it is blasphemy if the words are couched in indecent or offensive terms likely to shock and outrage the general body of Christian believers in the community. Now, even those who sit on the Benches of the right reverend Prelates are not so easily outraged now as when that summary was first given many decades ago. There are, of course, always traps for the unwary. In the case that Mrs Whitehouse brought against Gay News, that formula was put forward in rather strong terms. When we look at it now, we think that those involved in Mrs Whitehouse’s case, in 1979, perhaps discussed things in a way that is not appropriate to modern times. It is surely time to say that this particular privilege for the Christian religion has gone away and officially gone a distance that is far from modern mores and thinking. That particular privilege should not be on the statute book for that religion. I said ““the Christian religion””, but it is not at all clear that it covers the whole religion. The better view appears to be—I see my noble friend Lord Lester nodding, and on this he is indeed my noble friend—that only the Church of England can make use of that particular crime.