Toby Young
Toby Young is the editor-in-chief of the Daily Sceptic and the general secretary of the Free Speech Union and an associate editor of the Spectator, where he has written a weekly column for more than 20 years.
I wanted to ask Lord Collins of Highbury, who has just become a UN Special Envoy for LGBTQIA2S+ rights, a question about the government’s draft bill on conversion practices in the Lords yesterday, but couldn’t get in because we only had 20 minutes to debate it. So this is what I would have said – admittedly too long for a conventional question, although the supporters of the bill waxed on and on about how great it is and how urgently needed it is and how important it is to show some love to the most vulnerable members of our ‘community’ (aggressive blokes in dresses) and only added a cursory question after several minutes – which is why I couldn’t get in! Anyway, this is what I wanted to say.
I declare my interest as the director of the Free Speech Union.
The Noble Lord the Minister has pointed out several times now that successive Conservative governments intended to introduce a bill banning conversion practices – and said they would – and then didn’t. This was presented as a knock-down argument for why this bill should command cross-party support.
As someone who helped dissuade the last government from introducing this bill – and I didn’t need to wait for it to be published by the Office for Equality and Opportunity, formerly the Government Equalities Office, because I have seen it numerous times before with only slight alterations – allow me to explain.
That office, which takes the prize for being the most woke Whitehall department in an extremely tough competition, did its level best to foist this bill on a succession of Conservative ministers.
But all of them realised, before too long, that everything we think of as a “cruel and abusive conversion practice”, to quote the Noble Lord the Minister, is already against the law, and trying to criminalise conversion practices over and above what is already illegal would end up criminalising parents and medical professionals and pastoral leaders – such as the Right Reverend Prelates opposite – trying to talk gender-confused children out of taking cross-sex hormones, or puberty blockers, or – worse – surgically mutilating themselves.
They realised, contrary to the legal advice of the humanities and arts graduates in the Office for Equality and Opportunity, that any such bill would immediately fall foul of the European Convention on Human Rights – in particular, Articles 8, 9 and 10 – and would not survive a legal challenge. That’s why the SNP Government in Scotland abandoned its plan to ban conversion practices. And it goes without saying, my Lords, that the Free Speech Union will legally challenge this bill in the unlikely event it becomes law.
But the bill’s incompatibility with the Human Rights Act is only one of its shortcomings.
It is by some distance the most poorly drafted bill that has ever appeared before parliament – worse even than the Dangerous Dogs Act, which is going some.
We should call it the Dangerous Speech Bill, because what it seeks to ban is any dissent from radical progressive orthodoxy on the subjects of sex and gender.
The offence of engaging in an “abusive conversion practice” is so widely drawn and vaguely defined that almost anyone who expresses a gender critical view – i.e., anyone who’s a member of the reality-based community when it comes to sex and gender – would be vulnerable to prosecution and could be sentenced to five years in prison. That’s right, my Lords – five years in prison.
There’s no free speech defence, nor a faith-based defence, which previous governments have thought necessary to include when creating new speech offences, if only to avoid falling foul of the Human Rights Act.
In addition, there’s no attorney general or director of public prosecutions lock: no permission is required to bring a prosecution under this bill, unlike other bills criminalising speech, so any person or organisation could bring a private prosecution against a person or corporation expressing gender critical views – or indeed, against anyone defending people who are bullied and persecuted for expressing such views, which includes the Free Speech Union.
In the six years of its existence, the FSU has defended over 2,500 women who’ve got into trouble for saying they didn’t want to share single-sex spaces with men. And we continue to do that in spite of last year’s Supreme Court judgment about the meaning of ‘sex’ in the Equality Act – or the “Equalities Act”, as members of the party opposite continue to call it.
Yes, those zealous enforcers of this new ban would include Jolyon Maugham’s Good Law Laugh Project, so perhaps Noble Lords think we need not worry. But it would also include marginally more competent organisations like Stonewall – and I look forward to the contribution of Baroness Hunt to this debate, even though, as head of Stonewall, the Noble Lady was responsible for the policy of ‘no debate’ on this issue.
How many people will find themselves in the dock if this bill becomes law? According to the Cabinet Office’s Economic Impact Assessment, between 75,000 and 93,000 people a year are subjected to ‘conversion practices’ in England and Wales alone.
If Noble Lords are in any doubt about how widely these new offences are drawn, there’s your answer.
So my first question to the Noble Lord the Minister is: how many new prisons is the government intending to build to accommodate all these new thought criminals and why is that not included in the economic impact assessment?
Or will it just release more rapists and child murderers from our existing prisons?
That figure – between 75,000 and 93,000 a year – brings me to another point. The Cabinet Office, along with all the activists petitioning for this ban, routinely claim that this bill will criminalise “cruel and abusive conversion practices”, when they are already against the law.
But by propagating this myth – that cruel and abusive conversion practices are not already illegal – isn’t there a risk that victims of these practices – and I don’t deny there are some – will not report their abusers to the police? Indeed, may feel they have no choice but to submit to the abuse?
My Lords, members of this House on the opposite benches frequently rage and thunder against Elon Musk and members of the Trump administration for spreading ‘disinformation’, but isn’t this a textbook example of disinformation?
The Cabinet Office is knowingly publishing false information that will undoubtedly cause real-world harm. Or, to be more precise, is likely to cause non-trivial psychological harm to a likely audience – a criminal offence punishable by up to two years in prison under section 179 of the Online Safety Act.
Will the Noble Lord the Minister join me in reporting the Cabinet Office – and all the other advocates of this bill who pretend “cruel and abusive conversion practices” aren’t already against the law — to the Metropolitan Police? Or does the government only label false and misleading information likely to cause real-world harm ‘disinformation’ if it promotes a cause it disapproves of?
My Lords, I’m fairly confident that even this government, even after Andy Eyelashes has been installed as its new leader, will eventually abandon this bill.
Can I therefore urge the Noble Lord the Minister to take a leaf out of his predecessor’s book and tell the activists in the Office of Equality and Opportunity that he is unwilling to serve as their useful idiot? It will save him further embarrassment and spare Noble Lords having to devote any more time to debating this terrible bill.
That will allow us more time to devote to the real issues facing this country, such as the unending flow of illegal immigrants, the ballooning welfare budget, the collapsing NHS, our underfunded armed forces and the crippling cost of misguidedly trying to achieve Net Zero by 2050.
This article was originally published by the Daily Sceptic.
