Baroness Lawrence of Clarendon (Lab)

My Lords, I declare my interest as an anti-racism adviser to the Labour leadership. I added my name to Amendment 62 tabled by my noble friend Lady Chakrabarti. I hope noble Lords understand why I have done this, given my years of campaigning for race equality, in the criminal justice space in particular. Our amendment is essential but also modest and proportionate. We do not say that creative expression can never be admissible in criminal trials. We just say that there must be a strict rule against racial prejudice in particular. It is not new in our system to try to ensure that prejudice associated with criminal evidence should not outweigh its probative value, nor, unfortunately, is it new to find the police and the prosecution system working against people of colour when they should be protecting everyone from all our diverse communities equally. As my noble friend said, we would not dream of prosecuting a middle-class, middle-aged, white person for crimes on the basis of them writing or enjoying crime fiction. Why then are we happily prosecuting young Black men and boys on the basis of rap and drill music? I think we all know why. We talk about equality before the law, but 28 years after the Lawrence inquiry, we know the principle is still not a reality. My noble friend Lady Chakrabarti mentioned a young Mancunian man, a model student, a head boy aspiring to be a law student who had an unconditional offer to study law at the University of Birmingham—until the police and the prosecutors wrongly mistook him for a youngster in a nine-second video in which drill music was playing in the background. Through reliance on this ridiculous evidence, he was convicted of violent conspiracy. His conviction was overturned, but only after he served three years in prison. I urge the Committee to support our amendment and my noble friends in the Government to accept it.