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Racial and Religious Hatred Bill

There is of course incitement legislation already. If one were to publish a leaflet saying, ““We don’t want Jews living round here, let’s drive them out””, it would be caught under a section of our existing legislation that would not catch the same act if the word ““Jews”” were replaced by the word ““Muslims””. As has already been correctly pointed out, there is a range of legislation to deal with the incitement and harassment that can often apply in individual cases. In the past, however, the House has decided three things: first, in relation to race, that action against a group of people, as opposed to particular individuals, is so pernicious and corrupting that it should be outlawed; secondly, that the corrupting effect of racial violence or harassment is such that it should be an aggravated offence—we treat it differently from the same action against other groups; and, thirdly, only two years ago, that an act against someone on religious grounds should be explicitly an aggravated offence. The one thing that we have not yet done is to extend protection to a religious group. We have an entirely anomalous situation: because of case law, some groups, especially Jews and Sikhs, are protected by the law, but Muslims and Christians are not. My argument is that we should extend that protection to those groups.