Equality Bill [Lords]

My hon. Friend has intervened 10 or 12 times. We will have a detailed debate in Committee, and I hope that he will hold his interventions until that time. Many hon. Members wish to speak in the debate, some of whom will be disappointed. The House should protect our British interests. It should not destroy our traditions of decency, but that is what the Bill could do, in the extreme, if it is not tidied up and improved. The Bill creates a commission to enforce all laws on discrimination, including those on race, sex and disability, taking over from the existing commissions. It will also cover sexual orientation, age, and religion or belief. Part 2 creates free-standing religious discrimination rights for the first time. I hope that combining all those areas in one commission will work, but it could result in a very large and possibly oppressive bureaucratic body that has unprecedented powers and that costs a lot more than the existing arrangements. The other place, with characteristic wisdom, expressed great concern about the original clause 3, which charged the commission with the ““creation of a society”” in which there is no discrimination. Who will define and interpret discrimination, and who in this unelected and unaccountable quango will make the complex and controversial decisions between the groups? Let us take the case of Travellers, for instance. Some claim that it is discriminating for a community to expect Travellers to respect the same laws and regulations that the rest of society has to respect. I disagree with that, but I will not be asked to join the commission, because I am much too un-PC, as the House will by now have gathered. If experience is anything to go by, the commission will comprise some very PC people who push their marginal agendas on society. One has just to look at another quango—the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. Its gatekeepers are drawn in a very biased manner from the pro-choice side, neglecting the pro-life stance. Thus the HFEA is grossly out of step with society, but it thinks that it knows better than ordinary people and is pushing its agenda, fast and furious, against the stream of public opinion.