Racial and Religious Hatred Bill

My Lords, as the night is young, I should like to spend a moment congratulating the two maiden speakers in this debate, my noble friends Lord Foulkes and Lady Corston. The noble Lord occupies an important function in a most important football club, whose only vice is that it will not come south of the border to play Charlton Athletic at the Valley. The noble Baroness has shown by her quite remarkable occupation of the chair of the Joint Committee on Human Rights and of our party in another place how she has benefited from being a student at the London School of Economics and Political Science, whose motto is Rerum Cognoscere Causas, meaning get to know the causes of things—not just the causes of crime, but the causes of things—and that she has perhaps absorbed that atmosphere, which is so important at the school, of a slight distrust of authority. We hope to hear my noble friends speak often, much as I disagreed with both their very controversial speeches. On the Bill, I could easily follow those who have spoken about Mill and Hume and turbans and agree with the remarkable speech of my noble friend Lord Haskel. But I feel I should use the time I have to say why I could face with equanimity the enactment of the Bill only if it received some very necessary keyhole surgery in a revising Chamber. The trouble is that, as many speeches have shown, the Bill tacks on a bit to the Public Order Act 1986, without which it cannot really be understood. I say to my noble friends on the Front Bench that this House should demand, before the Committee stage, a Keeling schedule. So that they do not have to look it up in Erskine May, that is a schedule that sets out what would happen to the 1986 Act if the Bill were passed as it stands. Unless we have that, we cannot really understand what the Bill would do and the dreadful consequences that some of the enactment would, without doubt, although not intentionally, have for freedom of speech.