Conversion Therapy Prohibition (Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity) Bill [HL]

Lord Frost Excerpts

Friday 9th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Frost (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to speak at the end of such a fascinating, interesting and important debate. I imagine we have all heard things—personal experiences, reflections, arguments—that have made us think harder about our own assumptions in this complex area. I certainly have, but I am afraid nothing has shaken my basic view that this is a bad, poorly written Bill, which, if it ever became law, would have a number of rather damaging consequences.

I have certainly not been persuaded by anything I have heard that there is a genuine problem with violent or coercive conversion therapy in this country. These things are, after all, already illegal. What worries me is that the effect of the Bill would be—as we have heard from many noble Lords—to criminalise a much broader range of actions and interactions. The consequence of that—and maybe this is one of the underlying purposes of the Bill—would be to reinforce a tendency towards control and conformity that is already very evident in our society. That is what worries me. The Bill does it in three particular ways.

First, it begins the process of giving legislative force to the controversial view that simply hearing opinions that you do not agree with can in itself cause harm and should therefore be made illegal. This is a damaging proposition anywhere, but it is particularly harmful in this area, where individuals differ and where, as we have heard, there is far from societal or expert consensus—thus, free debate and discussion is vital if we are going to find the right solutions.

Free society works on the opposite principle to that. It works on the principle that everyone has the right to reach their own judgments and opinions, and equally, that every adult has the right to ignore such judgment and opinions and do what they want within the law. Once we question that principle, as the Bill begins to do, we are changing the nature of society. We are asking the state to be our parent, to protect us from uncomfortable concepts and challenging ideas. The only way the state can do that, effectively, is to define which opinions are acceptable and which are not.

That leads to the second problem: that the Bill is another step towards creating in practice a state ideology of approved and unapproved ideas. After all, without such an ideology, how do you know which opinions can be safely expressed and which cannot? In fact, we have already gone some way down that road. It is not possible to hold certain jobs in the public sector without signing up to—or at least not publicly dissenting from—a set of controversial beliefs about diversity and inclusion. The Bill would take it further into wider society. It would make it illegal for religious leaders with their flock, parents with their children, psychologists or psychiatrists with their patients, to express some of their profound disbeliefs, or even to broach certain ideas. Indeed, in some cases, such people would seemingly be required by the Bill to actively say things they do not believe in order to avoid prosecution.

That is obviously a problem in itself, but it is also a problem because in modern conditions, such a state ideology will inevitably be aggressively secular—not just neutral, as between different belief systems, which is what many of us think of as secular, but rather one that requires conformity to a particular set of propositions. This is the third way the Bill shapes society more broadly. These are not propositions shaped by traditional values, beliefs or an established philosophical code, but propositions defined by opposition to those things, in which there is no room for such beliefs. That is what the Bill represents, and it is why it is another step towards pushing religious beliefs out of mainstream debate. If it is not slowed, before long we will find that religious beliefs may be held in private, may occasionally be referred to in public—like a dark and shameful secret—but may never be actively brought into the public or professional square. When we reach that point, which is perhaps not far off, if you believe God created men and women in male and female bodies, you had better keep it to yourself, because the state may think differently.

To conclude, I am sure some noble Lords will listen to my remarks and think I am simply exaggerating. They may be saying to themselves, “How do you get from a Bill that purports to be about treating everybody decently and fairly to this nightmare vision of state-controlled speech?” In answer to that, it is precisely in these liminal, border areas, these marginal cases, that new directions get set. Of course, every human being needs to be treated decently and fairly, because everybody has intrinsic value. However, the catch comes when we go on to identify that fair and decent treatment as necessitating that no one should ever hear anything challenging to the beliefs they hold, even if they have chosen to hear that. We cannot ensure that in a free society, and trying to do it takes us down a very difficult road. The only thing we can reliably ensure is the right to disagree, to stop listening and to walk away. However, we have that right already. Do not let us start taking it away. Let us reject this Bill.