Increased Opposition to UK Hate Speech Bill

Figures from the world of culture and entertainment will launch a last-ditch campaign this week against a law which they fear will encourage religious bigots to go to court every time their sensibilities have been offended.

MPs will vote on Tuesday whether to go ahead with the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill, which the Government says will close a loophole in the race laws - though Tony Blair has privately predicted that very few prosecutions will result from it, if any.

Opponents fear it will stir up hardline religious groups who will try to use the law to ban books, plays and jokes that they find offensive. One senior Labour MP warned yesterday that the Bill also risked alienating Labour's white, working-class supporters.

Tomorrow, a diverse coalition including MPs from all three main parties, civil rights activists, the comic actor Rowan Atkinson, the novelist Ian McEwan and the director of the National Theatre, Nicholas Hytner, will meet in the Commons to plead with MPs to kill the Bill. McEwan - who will be speaking publicly on this issue for the first time - described it as "fundamentally illiberal, and likely to promote, rather than diminish, tensions between religious groups, and to exacerbate racial hatred".
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/story.jsp?story=648022