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Human Rights

My Lords, yesterday evening, when I was on my feet at a quarter to10 o’clock, a number of exhausted Peers began to moan and groan. I am very sorry that I taxed their patience. We have now had a three-hour debate and no one has had lunch; indeed, I have not had anything since a bowl of porridge at breakfast. That is a very good way of disciplining all of us, better than moaning and groaning. I do not intend to tax anyone's patience but perhaps I may say one or two things very quickly. First, I apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Hastings. It was my bad luck to be out of the Chamber for two minutes when he referred to something that I had said. I am very sorry about that. Secondly, I should like to thank everyone for taking part in a very well informed, very wide-ranging, sometimes provocative and fascinating debate, which will not be reported in the newspapers at all. That is a great pity, because many of the things that have been said are of great public importance. I should like to say to the self-appointed ““Peer in the street””—although I say to myself, which street, and which street in which city?—the noble Lord, Lord Patten, and to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chelmsford that I am as opposed to totalitarianism, whether it is secular or religious or in the guise of secularism or religion, as they are. I wonder whether the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chelmsford meant exactly what he said when he seemed to imply that there was no moral justification for interfering with cannibalism or human sacrifice. I would say that, these days, we certainly want to tackle abuses and not have, in the name of diversity or anything of that kind, a hands-off approach. As a liberal I believe above all in the existence of human fallibility. I keep on my wall—carved on a Welsh slate, because the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe of Aberavon, brought it to my attention—my creed. My creed is: "““The spirit of liberty is the spirit that is not too sure that it is right””." I am not sure that everyone in the human rights movement or in churches adopts that creed but that is my definition, and I think John Stuart Mill’s definition, of the spirit of liberty that animates, in my judgment, the Human Rights Act. As for a British Bill of Rights, I end simply by saying that a philosopher whose work I do not normally respect, Wittgenstein, ended a vast tome with these words: of those things of which one cannot be certain, one must needs be silent. I beg leave to withdraw the Motion for Papers. Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.