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Fiona Mactaggart (Slough): Is my hon. Friend aware that the right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Miss Widdecombe) has suggested that the Conservatives--were they ever to be re-elected--might consider reintroducing the primary purpose rule?
Mr. Singh: I thank my hon. Friend for her remarks. I heard about that today in the Chamber in a contribution by another hon. Friend. The world outside should know that and I hope that the message goes out from the Chamber. If the hon. Member for Aylesbury (Mr. Lidington) on the Conservative Front Bench is willing to intervene and say that the story is not true, I should be happy to accept his word.
Mr. David Lidington (Aylesbury): To satisfy the eager anticipation of several Labour Members, I should make it clear that we shall look at a number of options on what to do about the problem of bogus marriages. I think that Ministers accept that there is a problem, just as we do. However, we have not committed ourselves to any particular policy or course of action that we might include in a future manifesto.
Mr. Singh: I thank the hon. Gentleman for that explanation. My constituents will read his remarks with care. They will worry that measures against bogus marriages may mean that genuine marriages will not be accepted if the Conservatives come to power again and that there is a real possibility of the primary purpose rule being reintroduced. It was discriminatory from the outset, as was proved in practice. It divided families--man from wife and mothers or fathers from children--for years.
Mr. Mike O'Brien: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for being generous in giving way to me again. I remind him that the option of a new primary purpose rule, which the hon. Member for Aylesbury (Mr. Lidington) wants to keep open, was described by the Conservative candidate for mayor of London as "enormously offensive", "disgusting" and "immoral". The right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Miss Widdecombe) seems to want to keep open the option of returning to such a policy.
Mr. Singh: In that case, I am not surprised that the Conservative candidate for mayor of London is rapidly distancing himself from his party. Perhaps he will shortly announce that he is standing as an independent.
My right hon. Friend the Home Secretary has brought back the right of appeal on visitor's visas--a right that the Tories took away. He has introduced a criminal offence of racially aggravated violence, while the Tories turned a blind eye to racial harassment, racial assaults and racial killings on the streets of Britain. My right hon. Friend launched the Lawrence inquiry, which the Tories refused to do, because they did not care about the deaths of young black people on the streets of Britain.
With this Bill, the Home Secretary has launched a crusade against racism in public life, while the Tories pander to prejudice on the basis of emotions. The Home Secretary's and the Government's record on racism is one to be proud of. Labour's vision of a modern and fair Britain in which racism and discrimination have no part is one that I am happy to share and be proud of.
4.10 pm
Mr. Stephen Dorrell (Charnwood):
I am sorry that the hon. Member for Bradford, West (Mr. Singh) felt obliged to conclude with a rather partisan coda that spoiled the effect of his speech. Until a few moments before he sat down, I thought that I would be able to say that I agreed with almost every word that he had said. So I shall draw a veil over what I thought was a rather ill-judged closing passage and focus on the larger part of his speech with which I agreed, in particular the proposition that he advanced that, not just on both sides of the House, but more importantly in all our constituencies, there is a broad-based commitment to openness, decency and the desire for a successful multi-racial society. He was right to say that. He was also right to say that it is our obligation to ensure that that commitment by our constituents is converted into law to provide an administrative framework that delivers the objective that the overwhelming majority of them share.
Anyone who knows anything about the political history of Britain over the past 30 years will recognise that, despite the decency to which the hon. Gentleman rightly referred, race relations is a sensitive subject. Because of that, I have always thought that it should be approached against the background of a clear statement of the principles on which we seek to construct our policy.
This afternoon, hon. Members on both sides of the House have sought to examine the pragmatic consequences of policy. Of course, as practical people we must do that, but if a policy is to be successful it must be firmly rooted in principle. I want to focus my remarks on the two principles that are firmly embedded in the Bill and that I wholly endorse. Because I endorse them, I am pleased to welcome the Bill.
The first principle should, in the modern world, be wholly unarguable. Indeed, both principles should be wholly unarguable, but the first should never have been controversial. It is that any law that imposes standards of behaviour on private citizens ought to apply equally to public authorities. If we stand for nothing else, surely to goodness we stand for the principle of freedom under law, and if that phrase means anything, it means that the law must apply to every section of the community and should not provide a let-out for the public sector from principles that legislators seek to apply to the private sector.
I regard that principle as the bedrock of good law. It is of course the polar opposite to another principle that we have endorsed in this Chamber in large parts in the past century--the principle of Crown immunity, which my right hon. Friend the Member for Fareham (Sir P. Lloyd) accurately described as the principle that public officials do not need to be constrained by law because they are motivated by such high principles. He described that principle in language so flowery that it reduced it to the absurdity that it is. It is clearly wholly wrong.
Let me detain the House for a moment with an example that is way outside race relations, but illustrates the absurdity of Crown immunity in practice. When I was a health Minister, I discovered that the national health service, the nation's principal public health institution, was exempt from waste disposal regulations. As a result, in the disposal of clinical waste, the NHS was one of the major polluters of the environment in Britain. The law on waste disposal did not apply to the NHS as it was part of the public sector and therefore could claim Crown
immunity. Exactly the same principle lay behind the Race Relations Act 1976, which sought to apply a framework of law to private citizens and corporations, but to exempt the public sector. The law is flawed in practice.
The second objection to Crown immunity is that it is not just wrong in practice and in the practical consequences that flow from it, but that it is fundamentally wrong in principle. Indeed, if the right hon. Member for Chesterfield (Mr. Benn) were here, the debate might inspire him to make the speech that many of us have heard him make about the consequences of the English revolution and the importance of the King and the Government working within a framework of law. We ought to be committed to the principle that the public sector and the private sector should live by the same legal framework, and to the extent that the Bill gives effect to that important principle, it is long overdue and most welcome.
I said that two principles lay behind the Bill. The first is the abolition of Crown immunity and the application to the public sector of the principles of law that have applied to the private sector for a generation.
The second principle used to be somewhat more controversial, at least in the tabloid press. I am pleased to say that it is now much less controversial, but in my view it was right all along. I am a strong supporter of the principle that the law should prevent discrimination on grounds of race, colour or creed. It is important to be clear about what we say on that subject.
It is sometimes said that the framework of race relations legislation is a manifestation of the nanny state. I cannot count the number of times that I have been told that we cannot change human nature. Of course that is true, but legislators can define acceptable standards of behaviour. I do not believe that it is acceptable behaviour in a civilised society to discriminate between one citizen and another on the ground that one citizen is Jewish and another is not, one citizen is Muslim and another is not or one citizen is Afro-Caribbean and another is not. I believe that action, not motivation, is the key. The hon. Member for Bradford, West was absolutely right about that. Queen Elizabeth I said:
There should no longer be any doubt about the commitment of this House to a framework of law that outlaws discrimination between one citizen and another on grounds of race, religion or ethnicity.
Those are the two principles on which race relations should be built and they are embedded in the Bill. They are the reasons why I am strongly in favour of it, but I wish now to examine some of its detail, because one or two of its aspects and the history of its presentation leave me slightly uneasy. If we start from the point of view of principle, as I have sought to do, it is odd how cautious some of its text has turned out to be.
The proposed section 19B started off, as several hon. Members have pointed out, by outlawing direct discrimination in the public sector but would have continued to allow indirect discrimination. I am delighted that the Government have changed their mind, but I do not think that it is churlish to say that--given the
principles that I have just expounded--there should never have been any doubt about it. It should have been axiomatic from the beginning.
The same caution that led the Government to exclude indirect discrimination from the Bill lies behind the trouble that the Home Secretary got into when he was called upon to define the public authorities to which the provisions of the Bill will apply. The Bill, as drafted, does not impose duties on public authorities. It merely requires them to obey the law that, as private citizens, all the rest of us have had to obey since 1976. I can understand that the Government would need a schedule containing a definition of public authorities if the Bill imposed a new duty on public authorities that will not apply to private individuals, but the Bill will simply extend the ban on discrimination that currently applies in the private sector to the public sector. However, the Government then seek to say that the principle applies only to the public authorities listed in new schedule A1. That prompts the obvious question--which public authorities are not included in that schedule and why? To put that point more emotively, which public authority believes that its capacity to deliver its objectives demands that it maintains the freedom to discriminate against the Jews? That is the effect of the Bill as it applies to any public authority that is not in the schedule.
The principle that the House should demand be applied is that anybody who wishes to be free to discriminate on grounds of ethnicity or race should have to justify that highly questionable proposition. One of the groups that seeks an exemption from the overall provisions of the Bill is Ministers in the exercise of their immigration and nationality law responsibilities. That is definitely a questionable proposition. I accept, of course, that those who deal with immigration law have to be able to discriminate on grounds of nationality, but it is difficult to understand in what circumstances they might wish to discriminate between one individual and another on the ground of ethnic origin.
The Home Secretary referred to the example of refugees from Kosovo. Surely the whole point about refugees from Kosovo is that it is their Government who discriminate on grounds of ethnicity: our immigration law should consider the risk that an individual would face outside this country. That is what we should use as the basis for discrimination, not ethnicity or racial background. When will a Minister need to be able to distinguish one application from another on grounds of ethnic or national origin? Why are Ministers preserving for themselves an exemption from the provisions of the Bill?
The new section 19D that will be written into the Race Relations Act 1976 states that the prosecution authorities should be free to decide not to prosecute on the grounds of racial discrimination. The justification for that offered in the explanatory notes is:
We do not seek a window on men's souls.
It is not the motivation that matters, but the action, and race relations legislation seeks to confine the action within acceptable standards of public behaviour.
This exemption will prevent it being possible for a claimant to use the Act to discover the reasons for a decision not to prosecute, preserving the role of the criminal courts as the sole forum for determining guilt.
I understand the desirability of that, but--set against the principles that I outlined--it is a large derogation of principle to say that the race relations legislation should not apply to a prosecutor making a decision not to prosecute a citizen. That will put the prosecutor outside this key framework of law.
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