Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)

My Lords, this huge group was always going be pivotal for us to discuss, and it is full of moral dilemmas. I am genuinely torn on many of the amendments; I do not know where I stand on some of them. I therefore appreciate the debates that we have had so far. It has been very worth while to hear the different sides of the argument. When the noble Lord, Lord Mendelsohn, spoke earlier, he stirred me up. Every time I say “stirred up” I think of stirring up hatred; it was not that, but his contribution was very important. He emphasised that a lot is at stake, which it is. On the first day in Committee, I said that I knew that simply reiterating the formal importance of the right to protest is not sufficient for the period that we are living in, because we face new types of protest. We face some vicious and abusive gatherings that call themselves protests. That leaves somebody like me in a difficult dilemma. I am a free-speecher, but I have witnessed the visceral rise of Jew hatred in public and on our streets, so I am torn. I have a lot of sympathy with the intentions of the noble Lords, Lord Walney, Lord Polak, Lord Leigh of Hurley and Lord Pannick, and of the noble Baroness, Lady Foster, to name just some noble Lords, and I understand where they are coming from. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Mendelsohn, himself admitted, there are a lot of existing powers that are not used. That strikes me as the problem. We have a policing crisis and powers that are not being used, for cultural or deeper political reasons, so we try to compensate by making more laws. That will not solve the problem of the culture of normalisation of antisemitism—if anything, those new laws, which might also not be enforced, could be a distraction. Despite my reservations, my fear is that the deeper problem will lead to bad lawmaking and abandoning key principles that stand up for western civilisation, democracy and so on, because we are so desperate to do something.