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Racial and Religious Hatred Bill

The starting point is the quality of the legislation that we enact. Unfortunately, the Bill is of very poor quality. It is uncertain in scope, it requires guidance to define it, and its"““Savings for discussion, debate and criticism””" come very close to gobbledegook, as we have discussed. The meaning of those provisions will be argued endlessly in court. Lawyers will have a field day with them, and make a lot of money out of them—as they usually do when bad legislation is enacted. My view is that the Bill is unnecessary. The Lords have done their best to make it as good as it can be and, although I recognise that the Government want to have the Bill on the statute book, we should stick with what the Lords have done. In conclusion, I turn to the provisions concerning the savings for discussion and debate. The Government insist that it is somehow possible to split belief and believer. As I said earlier, that is not practical, and I shall read a short excerpt from a letter written by Rowan Atkinson in December. He put the matter so tellingly that I cannot improve on it. He wrote:"““As you may know, I have always been sceptical of the benefits of separating the concepts of beliefs and believers in that I have never believed that you can attack one without attacking the other . . . One should try to look at it from a comedian’s or dramatist’s point of view. A comedian is unlikely to attack a religion by pure reference to religious practices or beliefs: he is going to attack it by reference to the people who believe or follow those practices. All jokes and drama have to characterise a situation in human form. Knowing that there is a law that states that it is a crime to ““threaten, abuse or insult a group of people defined by their religion”” remains, I am afraid to say, very intimidating.””" That is the simple truth of how the Bill will be constructed if the Government amendments are accepted. It is intimidating. What is permissible, and what is not, is completely unclear. Most people get to know about beliefs or practices that they may not like or approve of through the medium of other people who practise them. To those who believe that the Government’s proposals will constitute a safeguard in that respect, I say simply that they really are not worth the paper that they are written on. I accept that the Bill is well intentioned, but it is not in any way capable of providing protection.