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Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

I think that that was in Lord Scarman's judgment. There is a difference between tending towards an immediate breach of the peace and tending towards the dissolution of the social order. The point worth making is that it might be an effect of the Human Rights Act that common law, like statute law, has to be interpreted so that it is compatible, as far as possible, with the Human Rights Act. Given that there is ambiguity, the interpretation of blasphemy as a public order matter is the interpretation that is most clearly compatible with the Act. That is how we got to the current situation. One of the arguments against the further existence of the blasphemy offence is that there are other ways of dealing with civil strife—other criminal offences that are aimed at preventing widespread violence. They include riot, provoking violence, and all the public order offences that we discussed earlier, including the threatening, abusive or insulting language crimes, of which there are three, all of which can be aggravated religiously and racially. There is also incitement to racial hatred and incitement to religious hatred. Then, of course, there are all the terrorism offences. The definition of terrorism is using violence to influence the Government in the interests of an ideology or a political or religious cause. Again, that is aimed at the idea that it should be clearly criminal to act in a way that tends towards the dissolution of society. In the background is the other common law offence that the House might at some point consider: the offence of sedition. It is sedition intentionally to excite attempts to change the law or constitution by unlawful means, or intentionally to promote feelings of ill-will and hostility between different groups in society. There are already other ways, either on the statute book or in common law, of dealing with what is now rightly seen as the fundamental point of the blasphemy and blasphemous libel offences, which is to prevent civil strife. The question of whether to keep the offences comes down to the issue of the protection of a single religion. That is about discrimination, as the Minister said. The offence singles out a particular religious view for protection. It violates the idea that the state should not show favouritism towards any particular religious view, or to religious views rather than non-religious-model views.