Equality Bill

The contributions to the debate on this amendment demonstrate the worth of having discussed this issue. It was good to hear the Minister using the word "proportionate" in her reply. That is what concerns us all. As for "ludicrous", "vexatious", "idiotic" and "silly", I look forward to seeing the noble Lords, Lord Elton and Lord Lester of Herne Hill, sitting with the Minister and working out a new schedule of silly people, silly organisations and silly measures. The tragedy is that that these are not "myths"—a word the Minister used earlier, although she meant it perhaps in a wider sense. These are not hypothetical cases but instances which have occurred. There are others, such as the example recently of a decision in a European court to require in Italy the removal of crucifixes from public places in schools where they have been historically placed for many centuries. We are taking some of this argument to absurd lengths and creating a backlash as a consequence. We ought to be careful where we tread. I was particularly pleased to hear the remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi. I concur wholeheartedly with her sense of proportionality. At some time in the future we may well need a short, crisp Bill just dealing with religious liberty and the right of people to hold conscience, not as a way of provoking hateful measures against other groups or oppressing minorities. I hope my own record over 30 years in both Houses of Parliament will demonstrate that you do not have to hate one country because you love another, or hate one faith because you are a member of another, or despise people who have no faith because you have faith. Often we are made up of our own upbringings. My mother, too, was from an overseas community—Ireland. Her first language was Irish, not English. She married my late father who was a Desert Rat and had been demobbed after the Second World War. They married across the denominational divide—not easy in the early 1950s. In Liverpool, the city I represented for 18 years, the Bishop and the Archbishop would not even say prayers with one another at the cenotaph in the 1950s because they did not recognise one another’s orders. It was as recently as 10 years ago that members of other faiths were welcomed to the cenotaph in order to celebrate the memory of those who died, from all backgrounds, fighting for this nation in two world wars. We have travelled a long way and need to tread with great sensitivity in these areas. I was thinking during the debate how fortunate we are in this nation to have the laws that defend our rights. In 1987, after I had helped to cofound an organisation called Jubilee Campaign, which works for human rights all over the world and in particular raises issues of religious liberties of all faiths and denominations, I travelled to Ukraine. I met there Bishop Pavlo Vasylyk, who had spent 18 years in prison. I also met the chairman of the committee for the defence of the church in Ukraine, who had spent 17 years in prison, and the young chaplain who had been at Chernobyl to clear radioactive waste without any protective clothing because he had been caught celebrating liturgies in the open. There are contemporary examples. On Christmas Day of last year, a young man called Robert Park walked over the border into North Korea because of his faith. I am chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on North Korea and have followed the case with great interest; the latest report is that he was beaten almost to death last week. He went there not in a hostile way but in order to challenge a regime that according to the United Nations probably has 300,000 people in its gulags today. The liberties that we enjoy in this country are of huge worth and we must take them seriously. Matters of conscience should matter to us and we must preserve them. The noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, mentioned provisions already in the Bill, which I had welcomed. I made it clear in my earlier remarks that the schedule applies to education, but I was advised that this was also the place to include an amendment if one wanted to extend some of these questions beyond schools. The Minister cited "acts of worship" and said that it would cover prayer, but prayer in an evangelical, protestant setting is often just two people sitting together and praying. Is that an act of worship? She will know that I mentioned that someone was disciplined not because they prayed with someone but because they had offered to. The person to whom the offer was made did not complain, but somebody else did and it snowballed completely out of control.