Equality Bill [Lords]

Oh dear—I am afraid that there are still little patches of the nasty party around. I was on the Joint Committee on Human Rights, which recommended that there should be a human rights commissioner. I am proud that we worked to produce a good report and proud that it was heeded. The commission would otherwise have been an inevitable outcome of our obligation to meet various Europe-imposed duties of equality on age, sexual orientation, religion or belief. The presence of human rights has helped to pull the commission, with all its faults—I am aware of my hon. Friends’ concerns—out of being a minimal pull-together and helped to make it look like a new venture with wider dimensions, involving complex problems with philosophical implications and an opportunity to drive equalities and human rights through a society that is still very unequal. When we talk about the respect agenda, we are talking about the need to regroup people around the common rights and responsibilities that we all share. The human rights in the European convention on human rights are a reasonable representation of those rights and responsibilities. Save those that we would all want to be absolute—life, freedom from torture, the prohibition on slavery and the right to a fair trial rights—the rights are conditional. They carry with them internally the rationale for the responsibilities that are required as a result of having them. For instance, in a democratic society the right to respect for the family can be interfered with if there is a necessity to do so in the interests of security, public safety, economic well-being, crime prevention, health, morals or the rights and freedoms of others. Set out in the convention is the concept that rights are available only in so far as they are compatible with corresponding duties or respect. No one can rely on their right to family life in their home if they are using it to blast music at others, perpetually playing it so loud that it is terrifying in itself because the defying of all decencies is so blatant. It will be necessary, in the interests of a democratic society, to protect the rights and freedoms of others by dealing with that. There is, of course, an overwhelming test of proportionality, but the values implicit in human rights are good, because otherwise, however we do it, we are imposing our own values on the disrespectful person. The validity of those values is contestable. Someone might say, ““Who is the judge to decide that my music is too loud?””, or ““Who is the prosecutor who brings the case to impose his values on me?””, or ““What right has the neighbour to complain just because she does not like my music?”” If we balance people’s mutual rights to a private life, taking into account the broader interests of society, we find that we have, at the very least, a rationale for what we impose that is grounded in values that run well with democratic society. Those values are demonstrable and explicable and can become a currency by which we all interact with each other, but they cannot become so if they are not promoted. That cannot be achieved by court cases on narrow legal points. The commission has a duty to drive human rights with the bite of legal powers, but the job of promoting them is a key part of that. There is much left to do. Good personnel must be appointed. We must equalise the law on equalities, redefine public authorities and ensure that none of the strands is weakened by their unity. There will be another Bill, but I congratulate my Government on this step towards equality, harmony and more respect. Question put and agreed to. Bill accordingly read the Third time, and passed.