Schedule - Hatred against persons on racial or religious grounds
Racial and Religious Hatred Bill
12:30 pm
Dominic Grieve (Shadow Attorney General, (Assist the Home Affairs Team); Beaconsfield, Conservative)
I beg to move amendment No. 2, in schedule, page 2, line 10, leave out second ‘hatred’ and insert ‘intense dislike or enmity’.
Perhaps the atmosphere in the Committee may be lightened as we come to amendments that I fully concede are probing in nature. They are designed to tease out what we are seeking to criminalise and the definitions. We have used the expression “hatred” in our debate this morning. It is clear from some of the contributions—I made this point earlier—that the use of the word “hatred” is remarkably loose. Some used it to imply that one wants to do something unpleasant, violent or criminal to the person who inspires that hatred. I hope that this amendment will provide an opportunity to debate the meaning of “hatred”.
As far as I am aware, “hatred” is undefined in law. The only two terms with any force in the Oxford English dictionary, which is the correct place to look in the absence of a legal definition, are “intense dislike” and “enmity”. I therefore sought to amend line 10 so as to specify that the religious hatred that we are talking about is the intense dislike of someone else or a group of people on the grounds of their religious belief. I did it quite deliberately, because most people would think that there was a difference between hatred and intense dislike. The fact that the OED does not see such a distinction is quite telling about what we are debating.
Why is it wrong to encourage people to dislike someone else intensely because of their religious belief? On the whole we should avoid intensely disliking anybody, although that is my personal view and I probably depart from it occasionally. There are a number of people in politics in this country whom I dislike intensely. I cannot escape it. I may intensely dislike them for a variety of reasons, but I must concede that from time to time I may have an intense dislike of one or two political figures. I certainly have an intense dislike of some foreign politicians.
Most of us may take the view that we are entitled—indeed, it is almost a collective requirement—to dislike some historical figures intensely, because we think that they were monsters. We dislike their views and we dislike what they did. However, why should one not be entitled to dislike intensely and to encourage others to dislike intensely the Satanist group, for instance, that decides to set itself up in one’s village and seeks a change in the criminal law to legalise paedophilia? I simply put that out as a suggestion. If we pass this Bill in its present form, expression of hatred, which is no more than intense dislike of such people, will be caught by its operation. The Committee must think about that seriously.
I do not want to widen the scope of the debate too much, or I will be straying into discussions that we will have on other amendments, but I hope that we can spend a moment asking ourselves what we mean by hatred. Will the Minister say that I am wrong in suggesting that it is no more than intense dislike? In which case, what does it mean?