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Coroners and Justice Bill

I hope that my noble friend on the Front Bench will not agree with the noble Lord, Lord Waddington, and his colleagues that Clause 61 should not stand part of the Bill. As we have heard, last year Parliament passed a new and important offence of incitement to hatred on the grounds of sexual orientation. That appears in the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act, although it has not yet become operable. It is very important because there has been some evidence of an increase in violent offences against gay and lesbian people. I believe that the police have reported a rise in the number of such offences, including a number of murders of gay men. Statistics for Greater Manchester in particular are extremely worrying. There is also much homophobic material in circulation that is intended to inflame hatred against people because of their sexual orientation. It may be argued that some songs, for example, do not really mean very much—they are simply songs—but they emerge from a culture, mostly in the Caribbean, that is deeply homophobic and where violence and murders on such grounds are commonplace. We have made considerable advances in recent years in our tolerance of sexual differences in orientation—with improvements in the law, civil partnerships and so on—but violent minorities still exist in our society. We do not want anything in legislation—any sort of loophole—that would encourage this. Last year, as the noble Lord, Lord Waddington, explained, an amendment was added to our legislation, in Section 29JA of the Public Order Act, which could provide such a loophole even though the movers of the amendment may not have intended this—and I am sure they did not. However, it could have a detrimental effect on gay people and it certainly stigmatises them. Moreover, it is quite unnecessary as the law we already have is meant to deal with incitement to violence. It does not prohibit the genuine expression of religious opinions or freedom of expression, to which the noble Lord, Lord Waddington, referred. Clause 61, which had a substantial majority across all political parties in the other place, is meant to remove this because it is felt to stigmatise gay people and thereby provide incitement for some of the more extreme elements in our society. We do not want a society in which gay and lesbian people fear for their lives, as unfortunately occurs in some societies in other countries. In Iraq, for example, which now has a democracy, a leading cleric has called on his supporters to kill homosexuals, and to do so in the most cruel and degrading way possible. In this country, we have moved beyond that; we are humane and compassionate, and we do not want that kind of activity. We should not put forward anything that could give encouragement to the nastiest in our society who want that kind of extremism here. Therefore we should support Clause 61 and resist efforts to delete it from the Bill.