Clause 58
Coroners and Justice Bill
9:00 pm
Edward Garnier (Shadow Minister, Justice; Harborough, Conservative)
I shall be very brief. I do not want to talk about the substantive law that is revealed by that section of the Public Order Act which the clause seeks to delete. I just want to complain about the way in which this has been introduced. Despite the fact that when published, when discussed on Second Reading and when debated in Committee, the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill 2008 made no mention of a crime of hatred against persons on grounds of sexual orientation, it was drawn into the Bill on Report. We spent about an hour and a half dealing with matters that had not been in the Bill in Committee, one of which was this provision and another was the extension of the banning of strikes by the Prison Officers Association. They came in and they took up half of the available day for the Report stage.
Nevertheless, we dealt with the new offence of hatred against persons on grounds of sexual orientation as best we could on that occasion. When the Bill went to the other place it was amended to include what I loosely call the Lord Waddington clause, which made express provision for free expression and so on. As I said a moment ago, I am not going to discuss the merits or demerits of the new law itself, but in order to get the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill through and to achieve Royal Assent by a particular time to allow the Prison Officers Association strike ban provision to come through, the Government entered into a deal. They entered into a deal with our party and with other parties too. One part of that deal to prevent them from being embarrassed in relation to the ban on prison officers’ strikes was to accept the Lord Waddington clause.
As it happens, I do not think that this provision has yet come into force under the Public Order Act 1986. I do, however, think it is pretty shoddy of a Government to put into this Christmas tree, plum duff, compendium Bill, this clause to undo a deal which they entered into to save their own skin last year. We should look with some scepticism upon clause 58, not because I have any views about whether it is a good or a bad thing to have a new law criminalising hatred against persons on the grounds of sexual orientation, but because I think the Government are being underhand and intellectually dishonest. For that reason, we should delete clause 58 from the Bill.