Lord Moynihan of Chelsea (Con)

My Lords, those of your Lordships who were in Committee will recollect that, as my noble friend Lord Herbert suggested, I tabled an amendment seeking to remove all aggravating hate crimes. One of the points that I thought that I made quite well was to show the utter incoherence of aggravators at the time. One law had a few protected characteristics, another had others, some had lots, some had a few. I thought that I had made a point there. It is as if the Minister has said, “Hold my beer; okay, if you feel that it is incoherent, we’ll just put all the protected characteristics into as many laws as we can and we will make it more rational”. I agree that that is the effect of this amendment. Like my noble friend, I am against all aggravator laws. I do not propose to make the earlier speech but I will rehearse very quickly some of the major points. It is quite a difficult stance to make. The Minister was extremely eloquent in saying why he felt that this amendment should pass and received a huge amount of support from the Benches behind him. It is a difficult argument to make but I will explain why I think that this amendment is bad and why aggravation of hate crimes is poor. I am going to make four points. First, they are clogging up the courts. All state resources are limited. Choices have to be made. If you put aggravation of a crime as an additional reason for prosecuting that crime, the police will be far more reluctant not to prosecute. You will not get the old-fashioned bobbying. We are not talking about trivial crimes. We are talking about serious crimes, and those can already be prosecuted. In the old days, a policeman could say, “Come on, chaps, break it up. Don’t do that”. But if someone had said, “You Black bastard”, or whatever—I hate to even say that phrase—the police would find it very difficult not to prosecute. It increases the time of the courts. But in fact, there is a better way than criminalising this, which is just to let society work it out. My noble friend said that transgender crime was on the increase. I have just looked it up on the AI, and apparently it is not. We know that hate crime against gays and lesbians has massively declined as society has come to accept that it is a perfectly natural thing and that it is something to just ignore or accept, but it is not something to criminalise. My second point is that this—