Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill

Debate between Baroness Noakes and Lord Cashman

Committee stage
Thursday 9th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Noakes (Con)]

I am. The need for the Bill has been established by a lot of rather irresponsible action by some of the unions which has completely disrupted the lives of ordinary citizens. Remember that the Bill is designed to protect the lives of ordinary citizens and to balance their rights against those that the noble Lord referred to. It will apply only to future strike action by workers—that is the most important feature.

Secondly, I will address the Joint Committee on Human Rights. Both noble Lords who have spoken struggled to paint this as a very damning report. It is not: it does not say that the Bill does not comply with international obligations but instead says things like it is “difficult to establish” or that it “arguably” contains insufficient provision. Although I have great respect for the Joint Committee on Human Rights, and particularly its chairman, who is an acknowledged expert in this area in her own right, it is not the arbiter on whether bits of legislation comply with human rights law. At the end of the day, it is for the courts to decide. The Government believe that it is within our international obligations, and there are good arguments for that. We should not take the view of one committee of Parliament as being determinative, even if that committee were clear and unambiguous in its findings, which it was not.

[Lord Cashman (Lab)]

My Lords—

Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Debate between Baroness Noakes and Lord Cashman

Lords Hansard - part one & Committee stage
Monday 1st November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cashman (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I was not going to speak to this amendment, but like the noble Baroness who spoke before me, having listened I am so minded. I will study the amendment very carefully, but a balance has to be struck. That is always most difficult on issues of human rights and freedom of speech.

We have to deal with the reality that hate speech, whether intended as hate speech or not, can often incite physical acts of violence. During the pandemic we have seen not only homophobia—as a gay man I have a particular interest in that, but my interest is in all physical hate crimes—but an enormous rise in physical hate crimes, some of them reported as happening on the crowded Underground or in domestic situations, because people are in much closer quarters than they would otherwise be.

My reason for speaking is to add a note of caution about how we proceed. I will study the amendment in detail, as I said, but we must respect that speech that could be defined as hate speech, or perhaps is not, can often encourage individuals to take actions against people who they feel should not be within their communities or do not belong.

[Baroness Noakes (Con)]

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lord Moylan’s amendments in this group. Somehow, we have ended up in a position where freedom of speech—a precious part of our way of life—has been seriously constrained by something the police have invented themselves around perceptions of hostility. I find it incomprehensible that the Government have allowed the police to carve out this territory unchecked. Why has the College of Policing—a wholly unaccountable body—been allowed to invent a wholly new form of recording of behaviour that, by definition, is not criminal? Can my noble friend the Minister explain how we got here?

The recording of non-crime hate incidents is not trivial. It drains police resources from the other things they should be doing: reducing knife crime; actually solving crimes rather than recording them; or making women feel safe on our streets—just a few of the things that ordinary people think are more important. As we have heard, those who have non-crime hate incidents recorded against them are often completely unaware that it has happened, which, if nothing else, is a denial of justice. The information can be kept indefinitely and, most chillingly, can be reported to third parties under the Disclosure and Barring Service. This means that the police have created for themselves the ability to wreck people’s careers.

We live in a society where the expression of views that others disagree with is becoming dangerous. The case of Dr Kathleen Stock is the latest example of this. Disagreement is too often and too rapidly equated with hate or hostility. The mere existence of non-crime hate reporting fuels this intolerance. The police are actively encouraging non-crime hate reporting by giving a platform to people who claim to be offended by the views of others. It is a cancer in our society that we should eliminate before it becomes dangerously pervasive.

Amendment 106 is a complex amendment and I pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Moylan for his clear introduction of it. I hope that my noble friend the Minister will not hide behind a critique of the amendment but engage positively with the substance of the issues that my noble friend and others have raised.