Conversion Practices (Prohibition) Bill

Liam Fox Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 1st March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Sir Liam Fox (North Somerset) (Con)]

Both sides have talked about the harm caused by many of the practices we have discussed, yet there is nothing in the Bill stating that intent to harm should be a prelude to any prosecution. Does my hon. Friend accept that if that were to be put into the Bill, it would remove many of the fears about the net being cast so widely that those who unwittingly cause offence might face such measures?

[Maria Caulfield]

My right hon. Friend makes a valid point. Some of the fears are about the unintended consequences of this legislation, and I am sure that amendments to the Bill would allay some of those fears. As it stands, although the hon. Member for Brighton, Kemptown has made tremendous efforts to address some of the issues, the level of care and attention required to legislate responsibly means that we need to look at the subject from a wider perspective.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Liam Fox (North Somerset) (Con)]

It is, as always, a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for West Ham (Ms Brown), although I feel that I must correct her on one point. The House was not denied the opportunity to take the Bill forward. The fact is that only 68 Members supported the closure motion: that is the measure of support for it in the entire House.

There has been a fair degree of consensus on a number of issues today. Most important is the consensus that coercive practices which attempt to change by force the legitimate and legal beliefs and practices of any individual in our society have no place in the 21st century. It is worth reiterating that at the outset. It is also, in my view, not for the state to interfere in the non-harmful behaviour of any citizen—including the right to freely express one’s sexuality, which, as a doctor, I consider to be simply part of a natural spectrum of human behaviour, and it is worth making it clear that we have a consensus on that as well.

I do believe, however, that we have a duty to protect the vulnerable from undue pressure, from whatever direction and for whatever reason it may come. I strongly agree that we need to protect individuals from undue pressure to express themselves in a way that would be untrue to their natural character, which is not acceptable in a civilised society; but, in the wider debate about trans issues, we must be willing to protect young people from undue influence exerted by those who may have different motivations so that they do not make decisions that might be irreversible and which, with a different level of maturity and experience, they might choose to make differently for themselves.

A couple of contributions have been of particular value. The hon. Member for Gower (Tonia Antoniazzi) talked about the risk of people being drawn inadvertently into the scope of the Bill through behaviour that they believed to be legitimate—for example, challenging young people so that they could gain the benefit of experience, in terms of what their parents might advise them to do. There is also the possibility of the medical profession being inadvertently involved if a practitioner expressed a particular view in private and was then asked to give advice. These are very complex issues.

I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Brighton, Kemptown (Lloyd Russell-Moyle), who I think has genuinely tried to get round some pretty immoveable objects when it comes to law in this area, and I am grateful to the hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Neale Hanvey) for reminding us that the debate is about people. It is not about abstract issues; it is about individuals and the impact that it has on their lives, and also how elements, at least, of the medical profession can be just as subject to the whims of fashion in politics as any of the rest of the population.

I am glad that the debate has been conducted, in general, in a thoughtful tone. It could easily have degenerated into what we might call strongly held views or inadvertent self-righteousness, but it did so at very few points. It is a debate that needs to be dealt with in a proper tone, but in the wider debate we have seen too much assertion and too little rational discussion. The best example I can think of is the treatment handed out to J. K. Rowling and her row on Twitter. Of course, our assessments of the volume of the response must take account of the fact that this is the world of the Twittersphere—or the X-sphere, as I suppose it is now—but such vicious, extremely aggressive and often threatening language really has no place in our discourse on serious issues in this country.

What struck me about that intervention was not that the writer herself was not entitled to post her views because of her background—as one critic put it, because

“her cis-identity and its majoritarian privileges are overwhelming”.

The sinister part was it was not a counter-attack or riposte to the views she had posted, but an attempt to delegitimise her and thus her intervention. Although the Bill will not go forward, I hope that across the House we can understand and agree that, wherever we come from on the political spectrum, we need to make it clear that the views of those like J. K. Rowling are just as legitimate as the views of anyone else. The aim to silence, cancel and delegitimise individual views has no part in proper democratic debate in our country.

The hon. Member for Brighton, Kemptown worked hard to try to get the Bill into a better position, and good law needs to be necessary, clear, effective and enforceable and to avoid unintended consequences. Like many in the House, I am not clear exactly what the necessity is for the Bill, because I did not hear described in any clarity the sort of offences that are not covered by legislation already and that would require yet another piece of legislation. When the Minister comes forward with the Government’s legislation, I look forward to its being clear about what exactly we intend to outlaw. We all understand the extreme elements that are the background to the debate, such as violent enforcement and so on. It disturbed me that part of the explanatory notes to the Bill, given to us by the House of Commons Library, said,

“techniques can take many forms and commonly range from pseudo-psychological treatments to spiritual counselling.”

That is where I had real reservations about where we are today and where I felt it was unclear what the necessity for the legislation was.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

The right hon. Gentleman says he does not understand or has not heard scenarios in the debate that would be covered by the Bill but are not covered by existing legislation. I give him the scenario of an unregulated therapist—that is, someone who is not part of any registered body, of which we have many in this country who do significant harm, and there is another debate, possibly, about registering them. That unregulated therapist can take a vulnerable person—to some extent, anyone questioning their sexuality or transgender identity is vulnerable because they are questioning—and repeatedly tell them that they cannot be that, they should be ashamed of that, and they should be disgusted about that. That does not meet a criminal threshold. It might meet a threshold many years down the line of a psychological harm that we will not know. Surely that is a clear example where this Bill, or a Bill like it, would act, but he suggests there are no examples.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Order. Again, interventions should be short—I understand the reason.

[Sir Liam Fox]

If the point the hon. Gentleman makes is valid, it is valid in the other direction, too. It should be wrong and, in his case, criminalised to tell any young person that they are definitely something when they are unclear about what they are. If that is what comes out of our debate today, that is a step forward in the wider debate.

[Sir Christopher Chope]

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

[Sir Liam Fox]

I will give way briefly because other Members still want to speak.

[Sir Christopher Chope]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that the noble Lord Winston put it well in the other place when he said,

“The basic problem is this: we are at risk of legislating for a piece of biology that we really do not understand. We do not understand the underlying mechanisms”?

—[Official Report, House of Lords, 9 February 2024; Vol. 835, c. 1847.]

[Sir Liam Fox]

I would not want to contradict the noble Lord in any way whatsoever, but there are other elements of the Bill that give me cause for anxiety. I know those are part of the reason the Government have found bringing forward legislation difficult. We have talked on both sides of the House about the concept of the harm that could be done by these processes, but there is no test of harm in the Bill. If all forms of conversion therapy covered by the Bill can be harmful, surely it would not be unreasonable to have a test of intent to do harm prior to any prosecution being brought under the legislation, and yet that is not in the Bill. That is a vital part missing from the Bill, because that is about second-guessing people’s intent, rather than any concept of their wishing to do harm. That casts our net far too wide in law.

There are two other points about the drafting. The first is that the use of the term “activity”, as well as referring to a “course” of action, means that a single event—a one-off event, or a one-off conversation—could, if interpreted in a particular way by a prosecutor, bring people within the scope of the law. That needs to be tightened, and I say to my hon. Friend the Minister that if the Government are bringing forward legislation, that is something we need to look at, as is use of the term “suppress” alongside

“orientation or identity…in full or in part”.

Again, this loose language potentially comes unstuck when a parent has a strong and necessary challenge to make against their child in order to give them a different view. It could be interpreted very wrongly if this was the wording of any legislation.

Finally, I will say this: we are here to produce good law in the House of Commons; we are not here to signal to any one part of the population that we are on their side. We have to ensure that the law we produce has the intended effect and that that law is necessary. I hope my hon. Friend the Minister will look at these elements closely in the days and months to come.