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Equality Bill

My Lords, I align myself with the sentiments expressed by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and the noble Lord, Lord Lester. What puzzles me in the drafting of this amendment is what is almost a duty in subsection (2). It says "must" and refers to, ""regulations made by a Minister of the Crown"," and says that the party must, ""publish information relating to protected characteristics of persons who come"," and so on. Subsection (11) of the new clause then says: ""Nothing in this section authorises a political party to require a person to provide information to it"." How is it going to do it? On one hand it must and on the other it cannot. For me, the drafting does not help. Secondly, human rights accrue to humans because they are human beings; they do not accrue to groups. It would worry me if a particular party seemed to have information that showed that it had a particular group of a protected category in large numbers so that you could then say that the party that did not have the same number was a party that did not welcome anybody. This is a charter for those who always want to cause grief. Some people actually want to remain private in their particular ways of saying things. It would be difficult to ask someone what their religion was, because the person might say, "It’s none of your business—why are you asking me?" Must we really reduce our individual persons to declaring always who they are, where they come from and where they belong, their ethnicity and agenda and sexual orientation? Some of those things may matter in terms of discrimination, if you want to tackle it; but if this kind of information becomes available, like it or not, some people will misuse it. For the sake of all our candidates, I think that this is ill conceived.