Racial and Religious Hatred Bill

It has been pointed out by Opposition Members that we have three hours for the debate, so I would now like to go through the four areas that are fundamental to my argument. I will of course take interventions at appropriate moments, but if I do not start to make those points now, I will not have even started my speech before the interventions end. First, I make it clear to the House that we now accept that the religious hatred offences should be separate from the existing racial offences in line with the framework agreed in the other place. The amendments mean that the offences will now form a new part 3A of the Public Order Act 1986, rather than being simply an extension of the racial offences in part 3 of the Act to cover religious hatred. The Government have had to think long and hard about that because we always argued for parity between the racial and religious offences. However, we have come to the view that as long as we can achieve a viable offence of incitement to religious hatred within that format, we should agree to the new framework.