Religious Hatred Bill

ied, confidently. “My fiancée doesn’t mind the memorabilia at all. In fact, she says that she quite likes it.”

That’s when I had to break it to him about women. “That’s not how women work,” I explained. “In a year’s time you will have decided that you don’t want all that stuff any more. That’s how women work.” Twelve months later, in an attic somewhere near Fulham, a poster of John Pertwee duly lay, slowly curling, leaning against a mouldering model of a Dalek.

Since the Government first proposed its invidious religious hatred legislation there has been a great deal of coverage about the circumstances in which people will be prosecuted. Ministers argue that the threat posed to free speech is very small, since any prosecution will have to be sanctioned by the Attorney General. It will be impossible for religious fanatics to use the law to persecute their critics.

Let me break the news gently to the Government, as I once so tactfully did to my science-fiction-loving friend. Prosecutions are irrelevant. That’s not how laws work. […]

The Racial and Religious Hatred Bill may not produce many court cases. Even on the rare occasions when the police and crown prosecution services decide to act, the Attorney General may intervene to avoid a political controversy. But this doesn’t mean that the legislation will have no impact on free speech.

Of course it will. It will have an impact every time the the local arts centre decides that perhaps it had better not book a certain act, or a cinema chain decides not to show a certain film, or a school decides not to hire out its hall to certain speakers. It will have an impact every time the wording of a council leaflet is changed or the local church changes its mind about the topic of its study evening.

In myriad ways, little by little, our freedom will be eroded. And most of the time we won’t even notice.

Pretty soon we’ll come to think that it was our idea, that we like it this way.

Laws, you see, work like women.