Freedom of Religion and Conscience

Lord Collins of Highbury Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Collins of Highbury]

My Lords, I, too, thank the right reverend Prelate for initiating this debate. Freedom of religion and belief is a human right which applies to everyone. Inadequate religious freedom is a threat to freedom of association, to freedom of speech and to social, economic and cultural rights. Respect and tolerance are the key ingredients in building a safer and more peaceful world.

The relationship between oppression of religious belief and armed conflict is clear. In the Government’s Building Stability Overseas Strategy it was recognised that,

“religious freedom is often crucial to ensuring conflict prevention and post-conflict peacebuilding”.

The report continued:

“Violence against a religious group can be a forewarning of wider conflict”.

As we have heard in today’s debate, hundreds of millions of people of all religions and none find themselves facing daily threats of violence simply for exercising this basic human right to practise their faith. Even those who look to defend the rights of others regularly face similar intimidation, threats and violence.

Too often when we discuss issues of religion and human rights, it is to consider the ways in which sets of rights conflict—or seem to be in conflict—with each other. I was particularly pleased to hear the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Guildford note that religious freedom is not ultimately in opposition to other rights such as freedom of expression, non-discrimination, women’s rights and gay rights. As a humanist, I would certainly not suggest that freedom of religion and belief be elevated over other human rights, nor that they can go unchallenged where the safety or rights of others are threatened. Yet neither can religious belief simply be seen as a right at the margins, to be considered only when no other rights come into play. In that context, the point made by the right reverend Prelate about the right to manifest religion taking precedence over other rights, such as the corporate image of a company, was an important one. Above all, a balance of rights and a recognition of context are indicative of religious freedom as a real, not just a nominal, human right.

As with other fundamental freedoms, religious freedom is something that benefits everyone because it creates conditions for peace, democratisation, development and human rights. To that end, I ask the Minister whether the Government have considered following the example of such countries as Canada and the US in prioritising the issue of protecting religious freedoms. Our country’s links of tradition and trade to many of the most troubled areas make it well placed to use that influence to best effect. And act we must, for the human rights abuses of which we have heard this evening must not be allowed to continue unchallenged.

Mental Health (Discrimination) (No. 2) Bill

Lord Collins of Highbury Excerpts

Friday 18th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Collins of Highbury]

My Lords, this has been an excellent debate, if too brief. I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, for bringing the Bill back to your Lordships’ House.

In having this debate, we signify that attitudes have changed, but we are also helping to move those attitudes on. I have devoted much of my life as a trade unionist to fighting discrimination in all its forms, but I know only too well that, despite all the efforts outside Parliament, what happens in this House and the other place is often pivotal and a signifier of a decisive change in the public mood.

Mental health is one of the huge policy challenges of the 21st century. As we have heard, Parliament needs to do many practical things with regard to policy and organisational issues, but in lifting the veil of stigma, signalling that public attitudes must change and turning the corner on attitudes to public health, there will be no more important moment in Parliament than when this Bill is agreed to.

As my noble friend Lord Patel highlighted, we know that the proportion of people who have mental health episodes in their life is high. That is why it is both important and useful to have people in the other place and in this House who are willing to talk about their experiences and how they came through their problems. I know that we will fully succeed in changing attitudes only when people feel able to speak openly of their own personal experiences.

As the noble Lord, Lord Ryder, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, have indicated, in the past, Members of the other House have not talked of their own personal experiences. That was so until the recent debate when Charles Walker, Member for Broxbourne, and my honourable friend Kevan Jones, Member for North Durham, spoke bravely and openly about the issues that have affected them. No one can dispute that they are, and have been, very effective MPs because they can often better understand the issues affecting many of their constituents. Their experience also shows that mental health can be an issue for anyone, anywhere, from all walks of life, at any time. It does not necessarily have to be permanent either. As with any chronic condition, it is how someone adapts and learns to live with the condition that makes them able to participate in society.

As we have heard, the presence of Section 141 in the 1983 Act is a barrier to those who may have had mental health problems in the past or who may still be grappling with them. Those individuals should be welcomed into Parliament with open arms because their experience is valuable. Parliament must reflect all of society. If it does not, it is a lot less effective and will therefore not make good legislation.

As the noble Lord, Lord Low, indicated, the changes in this Bill are long overdue. Mind and other mental health organisations have long campaigned for these laws to be repealed. They are clearly discriminatory and there is widespread agreement among MPs, political parties and all noble Lords in this House that they have no place in a modern and fair society. However, what is worse is that they are symptomatic of the prejudicial view that having had a mental illness makes you incapable of being a citizen with all the rights and responsibilities that that implies. They stigmatise this illness unlike any other. They put out the message that anyone with a mental health problem is not fit to be an MP. It is a message picked up, in my opinion, by all employers and is something that we know is experienced by the overwhelming majority of people who have suffered mental illness.

By adopting these measures, we can send a clear message to all employers that we need to address mental health problems in the workplace and put an end to the discriminatory attitudes that prevent capable people working. But we cannot expect people to be out and proud when laws that stigmatise mental illness still exist.

Every time a citizen is summoned for jury service, as I was a couple of years ago, they are reminded in the most explicit terms that someone who has suffered a mental illness is a second-class citizen. By passing the Bill, we will send a clear message that discrimination is wrong and that people have a right to be judged as individuals, not stigmatised or discriminated against.

Electoral Registration and Administration Bill

Lord Collins of Highbury Excerpts

Tuesday 24th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Collins of Highbury]

My Lords, I hope to be brief, not least because I hope to pop along to say farewell to Peggy Byatt, who has been one of the longest serving members of staff of this House.

Last May, when this Bill was introduced in the House of Commons, Mark Harper, the Minister for Political and Constitutional Reform, stated that the aim of the Bill was to,

“tackle electoral fraud, increase the number of people registered to vote and improve the integrity of the electoral register”.—[Official Report, Commons, 23/5/12; col. 1172.]

No one would disagree with that. As my noble friend Lord Wills has stated, it was for these precise reasons that the previous Labour Government, with cross-party support, put through the Political Parties and Elections Act. Those reasons also paved the way for individual registration.

However, in committing to this, we also provided for a phased timetable and independent testing of any new system, backed up with strong and effective monitoring by the Electoral Commission. Why did we do it in that way? We wanted to make sure that the systems to stop fraud, which we are all committed to stopping, did not also exacerbate an already growing problem of underregistration. As we have heard today, there are millions of unregistered—mainly young and low-income—voters missing from the electoral roll. The Electoral Commission’s briefing, which has also been quoted today, states that the December 2010 register was between 85% and 87% complete, with at least 6 million eligible people missing from it. It is the biggest scandal for our democracy that so many people are denied the opportunity to vote. The other issue that is combined with underregistration is the prospect that the growing number of people who do not vote in elections will not see the point of registering to vote. That concern is also shared by the Electoral Commission.

Without a concerted and prolonged campaign, it is possible that the register may go from the near 90% completeness that we hope we currently have to something like 65%. As my noble friend Lady Gould said, 65% will result in as many as 10 million voters losing the opportunity to vote. What sort of democracy is that? I shall repeat the question of my noble friend Lady Gould. Will the Minister give us the details of the implementation plan now? Will they set out the timetable in more detail and will they give us better figures on a budget to ensure that we have an effective campaign? This is not scaremongering when you consider the experience of Northern Ireland, on which we have had some very interesting perspectives. When the system was changed there in 2002 it resulted in a huge drop in the size of the register. It was such a drop that we had to address it in subsequent legislation, so we know that there is a problem that we need to address.

Although I believe very strongly that the timetable proposed in the Bill is too rushed, I welcome the concession that there will be a carryover for those who are currently on but fail to register individually. However, this will not happen in my household or in the many, many other households where everyone is registered to vote by post. As many noble Lords have pointed out, for many elderly people and people with disabilities, voting by post is their only real opportunity to vote. I do not accept the assertion of the noble Lord, Lord Baker, that the fundamental problem with our electoral system is the extension of postal voting. With the right measures—we have talked about how those measures can be improved—postal voting undoubtedly increases turnover. What we want is more people participating in our democracy. The fundamental problems are more to do with false entries on the register. All parties and all individuals can take responsibility to highlight where they think there are problems and address them. When I had that responsibility in the Labour Party we were very rigorous in pursuing any example where we found multiple registrations.

Why, therefore, will postal voters and proxy voters be excluded from this carryover which, as we have heard, is going to affect a lot of elderly people and people with disabilities? For the record, in my own household, neither my husband nor I will be eligible to vote when it comes to the general election; me because of my membership of this House and he because he is a Spanish national. We have talked about the errors that can occur and about checking each signature. Unfortunately, on one occasion—I am not going to say which election because I have proudly voted in every one—when we were completing our postal votes on the dinner table, I mistakenly signed his declaration and he mistakenly signed mine. Despite efforts to contact the appropriate authorities, I fear that my vote was not counted on that occasion.

As many of my noble friends have pointed out, the Bill rushes through a process that actually needs a lot of careful consideration and planning. Why the rush for the next general election? My sentiments about the Bill are accurately reflected in the following quote:

“I also agree with the Minister that it would be difficult to introduce a new system shortly before a general election. There should be other ways of testing the system along the way to ensure that the accuracy, integrity and comprehensiveness of the register and the system are always utterly watertight. I hope that that reassures the Minister on that point”.—[Official Report, Commons,13/7/09; col. 109.]

That was Eleanor Laing MP, Shadow Conservative Minister, speaking in 2009.

The noble Lord, Lord Empey, in his excellent contribution, mentioned those dreaded words “ID cards”. This is why I have always supported the principle of national ID cards—a national ID system. I have always been committed to it because it carries with it clear rights and responsibilities. I am sorry that many of my noble friends—I mean to say many of the noble Lords opposite—are not committed to that principle despite the fact that they want to ensure that the electoral register has as many constraints on it as possible. Yet they are not in favour of the one thing that would deliver a system of integrity in our democracy.

[Lord Empey]

I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Collins, for giving way. I referred to our system of electoral identity cards which are very specific and can be used only for voting purposes. They are slightly different from the national identity cards which were proposed here some time ago. Nevertheless, I am sure the noble Lord accepts that I agree with the point, which I suspect he is trying to make, that it gives an opportunity to know that the person standing in front of the polling station clerk is the person who is entitled to vote.

[Lord Collins of Highbury]

I thank the noble Lord for that contribution. I agree with him completely but I have to confess that I was using the opportunity of his reference to ID cards to have a little go. When we are talking about secure systems, we have to understand that that issue cuts across all civic society.

We need to ensure that any scheme of individual registration passes the test of accuracy and completeness. Here I agree 100% with the noble Lord, Lord Rennard. He and I have a lot in common in terms of our previous experiences of elections. He may have won a lot more elections, but the fact is that we spent our livelihoods and lifetimes trying to tell politicians to follow the rules and regulations. I agree with him 100% when he asks whether by focusing on accuracy we are missing the fundamental importance of completeness. That is what this debate is about, and it is what the Bill needs to focus on. I am sure that that is what the discussions in Committee will be about.

Despite some welcome concessions from the Government that we heard articulated today, I am afraid that they do not represent sufficient safeguards to ensure that the Bill will not result in millions of people being unregistered and therefore unable to vote. What we have is a speeded-up timetable for the introduction of individual registration purely—I put this at its best—to save money. Combine that with another important issue, the downgrading of the role of the Electoral Commission, and we are left with the potential for long-term deterioration in the accuracy of the electoral register.

Mental Health (Discrimination) Bill [HL]

Lord Collins of Highbury Excerpts

Friday 25th November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Collins of Highbury]

My Lords, this has been an excellent, albeit brief, debate. I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, for bringing the Bill to your Lordships' House.

The changes in it are long overdue. Mind and other mental health organisations have long campaigned for these laws to be repealed. They are clearly discriminatory and there is widespread agreement among MPs and political parties alike that they have no place in a modern and fair society. But what is worse about their existence is that they are symptomatic of the prejudicial view that having had a mental illness makes you incapable of being a citizen with all the rights and responsibilities that that implies. They stigmatise this illness unlike any other. It puts out the message that anyone with a mental health problem is not fit to be an MP. It is a message that is picked up by all employers and is something we know is experienced by the overwhelming majority of people who have suffered mental illness.

By adopting these measures, we can send a clear message to all employers that we need to address mental health problems in the workplace and put an end to the discriminatory attitudes that prevent capable people working.

We know that the proportion of people who have mental health episodes in their life is high, as my noble friend Lord Patel highlighted. That is why it is both important and useful to have people in the other place and this House who are willing to talk about their experiences and how they came through their problems. I know that we will fully succeed in changing attitudes only when people feel able to speak openly of their own personal experiences. But we cannot expect people to be out and proud when laws that stigmatise mental illness still exist. Every time a citizen is summonsed for jury service, as I was recently, they are reminded in the most explicit terms that someone who has suffered a mental illness is a second-class citizen. How can we change attitudes when this goes on? I hope that, after today, the Minister will ensure that the Government find time to make these changes, which are long overdue.