My Lords, I am fully in support of the amendment, of course, to which I have put my name. I have served on the Joint Committee on Human Rights, and we have condemned this provision and said that it should not be part of the Bill because it is a breach of fundamental human rights. I have been on quite a lot of demos, and I would probably run foul of this legislation if it went through unamended. I cannot think of any demo that I have been on where we did not try to make noise, because that is part of what being on a demo means. I wonder whether the people who drafted the wording have ever been on a demo themselves—I do not believe it. Those of us who have been on demos know that the noise is encouraging; it tells spectators, who often join in support anyway, what we are about and what we seek to do. This is an absurd idea.
I think of the span of history—my noble friend Lord Hain contributed to this discussion—and there are so many important changes that started with noisy demos. How did some of those changes happen? Without noisy demos, a lot of changes do not happen. One looks at the suffragettes and all sorts of important demos; this is the nature of our democracy, and this Government are trying to trample all over it.