Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)

My Lords, I have added my name to Amendment 382F, an amendment that, carefully and proportionately, takes on tackling the problems of the ever-growing number of overlapping Acts and statutes that are used to limit free speech. If public order laws on protest are, to quote the Liberal Democrat Benches from the other day, a confused mess, the labyrinthine patchwork affecting free speech is an impenetrable quagmire. The noble Lord has done a real public service here by carefully going through how, inadvertently and often by mission creep, censorious laws undermine democratic speech rights and are actually damaging the UK’s reputation internationally. I am not just talking about JD Vance or Elon Musk, who I have heard commented on in this House and dismissed sneeringly by many in Westminster as spreading just Trumpist misinformation or hyperbole. We need to recognise that even the bible of globalist liberalism, the Economist, no less, featured a cover last May proclaiming “Europe’s free-speech problem”, identified the UK as one of the most censorious on the continent and provided a lot of evidence. There has been lots of discussion all over the political spectrum in relation to the idea of 12,000 arrests a year, 30 a day, for speech offences that spring from laws that the amendment seeks to rein in, and for which this House is responsible. We are talking here about crime and policing, and the police are expected to treat speech offences as criminal acts and to police them. Since the introduction of hate crime laws, which I remind the Committee is a relatively recent concept popularised from the mid-1980s, the legislative and regulatory implications of restricting hate and words that are said to have caused distress have proliferated, and it has grown into a real tangle of tripwires. In that tangle, many people in the police and the CPS, and even politicians, seem confused about what one can say legally and what is verboten. I am sure that noble Lords will remember the extraordinary story of the Times Radio producer, Maxie Allen, and his partner, Rosalind Levine. They were the couple who were arrested by six uniformed officers, in front of their young children, for posting disparaging messages about their daughter’s school in a private WhatsApp group. It received a lot of publicity, and they have just been paid £20,000 for wrongful arrest, although they have not received an apology. What stood out for me about that story was that when the police officers went into her house, Ms Levine asked what malicious communication offence they were being accused of. The detective did not know, had to Google it and then read out what Google said. That strikes me as not healthy. We as legislators have a responsibility to tackle this. Too often, we just pass more and more laws, with more restrictions on freedom, and never stop to look at whether anything on the statute book can be repealed, streamlined or rolled back. I commend the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan of Chelsea, for his detailed, well-thought out and proportionate attempt at tackling the way the law has grown and the negative impact that is having on democratic free speech. I also want to commend him for his courage in taking on this issue. As we know, and he referred to this, if anyone takes on hate speech laws, you just think, “Oh, my goodness, he’s going to be accused of all sorts of things. He’s going to be accused of being a bigot. It’s a risk”, so when he told me he was doing this, I gulped. It is horrible to be accused of being a racist, a misogynist, homophobic, a hatemonger, or whatever, but that is the very point. Being accused of being pro-hate speech, if you oppose hate speech legislation, is itself silencing of a democratic discussion on laws and we as legislators should not be bullied or silenced in that way. Ironically, the best tool for any cultural shift in relation to prejudice, in my view, is free speech. To be able to take on bigotry, we need to be able to expose it, argue against it and use the disinfectant of free speech to get rid of the hate, whereas censorship via hate speech laws does not eliminate or defeat regressive ideas; it just drives them underground to fester unchallenged. The noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, has laid out the key legal problems in his approach to this, especially in relation to the lack of precision in terminology used across speech-restricting laws. He has raised a lot of real food for thought. Perhaps I can add a concern from a slightly different perspective, to avoid repeating the points he has made. For me, there is another cost when law fails to clearly define concepts such as abusive or insulting words, grossly offensive speech, and what causes annoyance, inconvenience and needless anxiety—these things are littered all over the law. It is that the dangerously elastic framing of what speech constitutes harm or hate has been deeply regressive in its impact on our cultural norms. There has been a sort of cultural mission creep which has especially undermined the resilience of new generations of young people. The language of hate speech legislation now trips off the tongues of sixth-formers in schools and university campus activists. When they complain that they disagree with or are made to feel uncomfortable by a speaker or a lecturer and say that they should be banned for their views, they will cite things straight out of the law such as, “That lecturer has caused me harassment, alarm and distress”. Where did they get that from? They will say that those words are perceived as harmful and that if they heard them, it would trigger anxiety—even claiming post-traumatic stress disorder is fashionable. It is because we have socialised the young into the world of believing that speech is a danger to their mental well-being, which has cultivated a grievance victimhood. It is a sort of circular firing squad, because the young, who feel frightened by words which they have picked up and been imbued with from the way the law operates, then demand even more lawfare to protect themselves and their feelings from further distress. They are even encouraged to go round taking screenshots of private messages, which they take to the police, or they scroll through the social media of people they do not like to see whether there is anything they can use in the law. The law has enabled the emergence of a thin-skinned approach to speech, and this has been institutionalised via our statute book. The police do not seem immune to such interpretations of harmful words, either, and I am afraid that this can cause them to weaponise the power they have through this muddle. It wastes police resources and energy, an issue very pertinent to this Bill. I will finish with an example. In August 2023, an autistic 16 year-old girl was arrested for reportedly telling a female police officer that she looked like her lesbian nana. The teenager’s mother explained that this was a literal observation, in that the police officer looked like her grandmother, who is a lesbian. The officer understood it as homophobic abuse, so a Section 5 public order offence kicked in on the basis of causing “alarm or distress” by using abusive language. If you witness the film of the incident, seven police officers entered the teenage girl’s home, where she was hiding in the closet, screaming in fear and punching herself in the face. You may ask who was distressed in that instance. The girl was held in custody for 20 hours and ultimately no charges were brought. But we must ask whether the statute book has created such confused laws and encouraged police overreach, and whether it encouraged that young police officer, who heard someone say the words “lesbian nana”, to immediately think, “arrest her, hold her for 20 hours and say that she is causing distress”. What has happened to the instincts of a police officer when they think that this would be the answer? Many people to whom I speak about the problem addressed by this amendment suggest that it has been overstated. They say that, yes, the police are a bit too promiscuous in arresting people, but the numbers charged and convicted are fairly stable. In fact, a journalist recently told me that in some instances they are going down. But as legislators, should we not query whether this implies that the laws are giving too much leeway to the police to follow up malicious, trivial and politicised complaints? This creates the chilling consequence of the notion of process as punishment: you might not be charged, but you are arrested, and law-abiding citizens are humiliated and embarrassed with the cops at the door. We must take this amendment very seriously, and I hope that the Minister will give us a positive response.