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Freedom of Speech

I thought I was going to get injury time, my Lords. Religious leaders are leaning over backwards to try to build bridges, but something very important has happened over the past 10 or 15 years. I do not accept the idea of a change of climate so much as a radical shift from a clash between political ideologies—communism on one side, led by China and the USSR, as it was, and on the other western Europe and the United States—to a clash between religious belief systems. These ideologies—they are both forms of ideology to me as a non-religious person—produce an intense belief that people are prepared to fight for and die for. Religious wars are no better than political wars if you get into that ideological struggle. It has been one of my arguments for some time that, when a political ideology declines, a religious ideology often emerges to replace it, and vice versa. There is a lot of evidence for that in various parts of the world at various times. In the present climate—my noble friend Lord Dubs was right about this—we have to defend freedom of speech very powerfully. That does not mean that you exercise it without thought and consideration for other people. I have the freedom to make faces at my neighbour; I do not do it—it would not be sensible to do it. Similarly, if you are going to exercise freedom of speech, you have to ask yourself about the way in which it will impact on the people who may suffer from its consequences. I was struck by what the noble Lord, Lord Monson, said. He is absolutely right: there were many examples of slight erosions, as they were regarded, of freedom of speech many years ago. That is why I say that it is not new, aside from the ideological clash. In the 1940s particularly, a real problem with freedom of speech was that, if you were from an ethnic minority, you had to suffer abuse—real abuse. The noble Lord talked about being politically correct, but the laws were introduced to protect a minority. Of course, you can define a democracy as the majority will, but if you ignore the rights of the minority, you have a very poor democracy, and I think that that is part of the equation. If I am right about the clash of religions, it is important that we in the West understand that the argument is largely within Islam. It has to be within Islam. We can talk about what we would like, but in a real sense there is a struggle within Islam, a struggle over modernisation. My strong belief is that the modernisers will win. The vast bulk of Muslim opinion is strongly in favour of freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom of belief, democracy and the rest. If we recognise that, we recognise something important. The other part of the problem has to do with two events in the past week or so that have made the noble Baroness’s debate so important. On one hand, there was the provocation by a group of extremist Islamists carrying placards urging the killing of other people and so on. On the other hand, Nick Griffin of the BNP walked out of court saying that Britain was like Bosnia. Britain will be like Bosnia only if the extremists of that Islamic group or of the BNP actually win. It is our job—our duty—to make sure that they do not. The police probably did the right thing in not arresting the people carrying placards last week, but I very much hope that they follow this up. There is profound danger if we allow things like that, which provoke the rest of the population and open up the divide on race and religion again. That is what produces real danger for all of us and poses a real danger to freedom of speech, not some of the lesser issues that we can deal with in the normal course of events.