Baroness Brinton (LD)

My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, for bringing this amendment back, because I had some thoughts on this after the debate we had in Committee. Having read English at university, I went back to the definition of “alarm” and started to look at the definition used in the Public Order Act. There are components of causing alarm, particularly in the Public Order Act, which the noble Lord wants to amend. The levels at which charging happens use different definitions of alarm, which are quite interesting for these purposes. The definition of alarm in this context is to create a state of apprehension, fear or panic in a person, often accompanied by a sense of immediate danger or worry that something unpleasant is going to happen to them. There is a key difference in usage. Section 4A of the Public Order Act details using “threatening, abusive or insulting” conduct with “intent to cause … harassment, alarm or distress”, and, on likelihood, using threatening or abusive conduct that is likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress, without necessarily intending to. The issue I take with the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, is that he says it is all just about how you are feeling, but the point is that the definitions at the different levels within the Public Order Act, at least semantically, seem to show that it is more than that, because you need to identify what has triggered that sense of alarm. It is a range, as we have discussed in previous debates. Because his amendment wants to remove “alarm” from intentional harassment, alarm or distress, it falls at the higher level that I have just described. I wonder whether he might reconsider it in that light, because when the 1986 Act went through it was clearly very well thought through. Interestingly, the OED definition: “To make (a person) feel suddenly frightened or in danger; to strike or fill with fear”, says that more recently it has been seen in a slightly weakened use. However, the WordWeb online dictionary says: “Experiencing a sudden sense of danger”. In a lot of dictionaries I have looked up, there is the repeated use of it as not just how you feel but a panic response to danger, a heightened level. Therefore, certainly in my books, it should stay with harassment as well, because they are both more serious than just feeling a bit worried about something, which is what the noble Lord described.