Racial and Religious Hatred Bill

As my hon. Friend the Minister knows, I have genuinely worked hard in trying to support the Bill, even up until yesterday evening. If today’s vote was on whether the Minister is a good man, we would have no need for a Division. If the question was whether his assurances can be trusted, there would be no need for a Division. If the question was whether there are good intentions behind the Bill, there would be no need for a Division. It is a source of regret, by the way, that we have to discuss such issues on the basis of whipped party votes. Whatever view the House comes to, the outcome would have far more legitimacy in the eyes of the public and of all the groups affected by this legislation if they could feel that we had reached it on the basis of genuinely open judgments of our own. We, as a House, do ourselves a huge disservice when we treat such issues in this way. A central issue that I and others have wrestled with has run through the entire debate surrounding the Bill from the very outset: is it possible to give additional protection to believers for the reasons that have been adduced, while at the same time avoiding giving unwarranted protection to beliefs? I started off by thinking that it would be almost impossible to do that. I wanted the ability to say that I hate religious bigots. I do hate religious bigots. Hatred means intense loathing. I have intense loathing of religious bigots. In fact, I want to go around urging other people to hate religious bigots. The world would be a better place if we all hated religious bigots, and I am instinctively anxious about a piece of legislation that makes it in some respects harder, and in other respects illegal, to go around saying that I hate religious bigots. However, I was prepared to examine the case to see whether we could achieve a balance. When I asked the Minister about these things before, he assured me, and he has done his best to redeem the pledge, that he would try to find the correct balance and to insert a savings clause in the Bill guaranteeing the free speech that we were worried about. In the immensely difficult task of squaring the circle, he was helped hugely by what the other place has done. The Lords delivered to us a Bill which, if it did not completely square the circle, did it as well as it was humanly possible to do. I would have been very happy to support it on that basis. We would have fulfilled our manifesto commitment, but we would have done it in a way that did not damage the traditions of free speech that are essential to our society. I regret the fact that the Government have not felt it possible to accept what the other place has done. They have put into the Bill a savings clause, but they have done that in a way that cuts it away again. That is the difficulty. I am a rebel, but a very reluctant rebel. I did not want to oppose the Bill, because the Government are introducing it for the right reasons, but we should be wary about crossing a boundary. Whichever view people take on what we are doing, we are crossing a boundary tonight as we move from believers to beliefs. I do not feel comfortable crossing that boundary. I do not feel comfortable giving protections to belief systems, which is essentially what we are doing. In doing that, we are cutting against what we think is the tradition of an open society. The only values that we should seek to protect in law are the values that protect our democracy itself. One of those values—the key value—is the ability to attack other people’s belief systems with all the vigour that we can command. In so far as we depart from that and depart from it knowingly, we do damage to the democratic system itself.