Misty Media Sex Blog

October 26th 2005, 19:11 Jeff Sela

The House of Lords yesterday voted, with a large majority, to approve amendments to the Racial and Religious Hatred bill, which the government has been trying to get into law for years. Lord Lester of Herne Hill was unhappy with the government's unrelenting attempts to get the bill through in its current state:

I am grateful to Ministers and their advisers for having met me on several occasions during the past year. …Yet I cannot admire the way in which this sensitive issue has been handled by the Government. I am sorry to say that the Government have played politics with religion and race; a dangerous game that they may come to regret. Having promised me that there would be full consultation after the recent general election, they made it a manifesto Bill. They used it as a means of persuading Muslims to vote Labour and introduced it without the promised consultation—almost as an emergency measure, driven, no doubt, by a Prime Minister who is now in such a hurry. They have lacked a sense of proportion, using the sledgehammer of a sweepingly broad array of new speech crimes to deal with what they admit to be a minute gap in the existing law protecting public order.

It's still possible for the government to get the bill through unchanged, by invoking the Parliament Act, but hopefully they will now be persuaded look again at how to make it less of a danger to free speech before continuing.