Schedule - Hatred against persons on racial or religious grounds
Racial and Religious Hatred Bill
9:00 am
Lynne Featherstone (Shadow Minister, Home Affairs; Hornsey and Wood Green, Liberal Democrat)
If the hon. Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve) thought that it was daunting for him, it was certainly daunting for me. We have three sets of amendments. They are all probing amendments, and underlying them all is the fact that we do not want incitement to religious hatred in any case. However, for the sake of argument, amendments Nos. 34, 35, 38, 40 and 42 pave the way for the following three sets. We want to know exactly what is the point of the Government’s change to the likely limb in terms of race. If the point is to make prosecution more likely to be successful, surely lowering the threshold is what the Government wish to do. We have tabled amendments Nos. 35, 48, 37, 49, 39, 50, 41, 51, 43, 52, 44 and 77 for that purpose. If the Government wish to lower the threshold, why not change the word to “liable”? That would change the test from the balance of probability to risk only.
The second set of amendments applies to religion only; we are not arguing the point on grounds of race. Amendments Nos. 53 to 64 are probing amendments. They might be considered to create a higher threshold, but they deal with what the Government are seeking to do in terms of the prior limb. We are saying that in order to be guilty of an offence of incitement to religious hatred the person would at least have intended to be heard or seen.
The third set of amendments relates to the recklessness test to which the hon. Member for Beaconsfield referred. Amendments Nos. 71 to 76, taken with amendments Nos. 8, 13 and 17 to 20, are about recklessness. I am not a lawyer, as I said yesterday, but I understand that the law uses recklessness as a benchmark to judge whether the perpetrator knew what they were doing and what the likely consequences of it would be, but proceeded to do it anyway. I seek an explanation from the Minister because I fear there is likely to be a mess, and a feast for lawyers, if the Bill is enacted as drafted.