Equality Bill

My Lords, I spoke much about this issue at Second Reading at col. 1416 when I explained my great concerns about the way in which religion and belief are treated in the same way as the other characteristics protected in Clause 148(1)(b). I have been warning about this for a long time. For those who live the kind of sad life that involves reading a lot of stuff, I wrote an article in 2008, Extending the Equality Duty to Religion, Conscience and Belief: Proceed with Caution. In that article I explained my concerns. Essentially, I seek to make sure that only workable duties are imposed on public authorities and that those duties do not create division, but encourage cohesion. The most reverend Primate the Archbishop of York has already referred to the danger of encouraging silos. I am very concerned that once one deals with religion and belief as though they are the same as race or gender, one raises problems regarding free speech, for example—which the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Wirral, will remember that we grappled with when we dealt with race-hate speech and whether the law should be extended to cover religious-hate speech. There was a movement, especially among British Muslims at that time, for religious-hate speech to be treated in exactly the same way as race-hate speech. The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, and I managed to achieve a victory, whereby religious-hate speech was treated differently from race-hate speech. We had a similar problem with blasphemy. The antique common-law offence of blasphemy gave rise to demands that it should be extended to protect Islam against insults. That was a dangerous idea, and we dealt with it by abolishing blasphemy. To use that disgusting simile, we shot the fox and got rid of the problem. The problem with Clause 148(1) is that in paragraph (a) public authorities must ""have due regard to the need to … eliminate discrimination, harassment, victimisation and any otherconduct that is prohibited by or under this Act"." That is admirable. It includes religion and belief, or lack of belief, and that is fine. Clause 148(1)(c) refers to the need to: ""foster good relations between persons who share a relevant protected characteristic and persons who do not share it"." That means promoting good relations between persons of particular faiths and those of no faith. There is everything to be said in favour of doing so. Clause 148(3) builds upon that by requiring due regard to be placed on advancing equality of opportunity between persons who share a relevant protected characteristic and persons who do not share it, in particular the need to remove or minimise disadvantages, meet needs, encourage people, and so on. My concern is that religion and belief are extremely important, but we do not want thin-skinned or zealot-minded people to start attacking public authorities because they represent particular sectors and say that the authorities are not advancing equality of opportunity—whether they are scientologists, Muslims, Jews, atheists, humanists—and that as they do not share the same characteristics as others, they will judicially review the authorities if they do not do so. The problem is that if my amendment is accepted, it would be said by some that I am creating some kind of hierarchy by taking religion and belief out and leaving in all the other protected characteristics. I am not creating a hierarchy; I am seeking to recognise that religion and belief cannot simply be treated identically for the reasons I gave about cohesion and the wish to avoid divisiveness. One person’s religion is, unfortunately, another person’s blasphemy, and there is no way in which those can easily be reconciled. I am very pleased that, at this late hour, I am in the presence of the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of York for this reason, among many others: the only way in which my amendment can, in the end, succeed is—if I can put it this way—if he and his colleagues liberate us and allow us to do so. If the position of the Church of England were that in some way it wished this to remain as it is, I expect that the Conservative Party—although not always correctly described as the Church of England in politics or the other way round—would probably not support getting rid of Clause 148(1)(b). I hope that in this debate, at the least, my concerns might lead others to say that they have concerns and that might lead the Minister to say that she will go away and think about this again. I do not seek to do any more than that, but if I could accomplish that this evening, so that we can all think about this more, I would think we had done something really important at this late hour. I beg to move.