LAWS WORK LIKE women. That is what is wrong with the Government’s Racial and Religious Hatred Bill. Laws work like women.

A few years ago a friend of mine arrived in the office on a Monday morning and surprised all his colleagues by announcing that over the weekend he had become engaged. We had no idea that there was a woman in his life. I, for one, thought that the only person that my friend really loved was Dr Who. And, strictly speaking, Dr Who isn’t even a person. He’s a Time Lord.

Anyway, after offering my congratulations, I felt emboldened to give him (my friend, that is, not Dr Who) a warning. I fear, I said as gently as I could, that the science fiction memorabilia adorning your flat will be gone within a year. The model Daleks, the signed picture of Captain Kirk, the lot. “No, no” he replied, 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.

Allow me to give you an example. Earlier this year I commented in The Times on a change in the logo of the Metropolitan Police. The Met used to use the words “Working for a safer London”, printed in italics. Scotland Yard, I wrote, had concluded that the italics might break the law by discriminating against visually impaired people, thereby violating the Disability Discrimination Act 1995. So the Met has now changed the words to plain type: “Working together for a safer London.” This alteration cost many thousands of pounds. I argued that this was perhaps not the optimal use of resources. I hope you don’t feel I was being unreasonable.

Some people did. My article was immediately criticised by a member of the Government as being a ridiculous slur. There was nothing in the Act that required such a change. I was just engaging in a typical right-wing attack on disabled people by trivialising the changes the Act brought about. I was making it up.

Yet I wasn’t making it up. I only wish I had been. Here is what Scotland Yard’s spokesman had to say at the time: “The old logo was not compliant with the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 because it was slightly italicised and it may have proved difficult to read for visually impaired people.”

This episode is very revealing. I’m sure that those responsible for the legislation did not intend that public bodies should waste taxpayers’ money on footling changes to their logo. And, although I am no expert, I am willing to accept that my critic was correct in arguing that the legislation does not require such an idiotic change. Yet the fact remains that the change was made and it was made because of the law. Moreover, it wasn’t made by some obscure body without experience in dealing with legal matters. It was made by the police.

How could this happen? Because the police took advice from their in-house legal experts, I bet. And the legal advice was that the legislation passed in 1995, this year began to apply to them and, if they wanted to avoid falling foul of it, they had better get rid of their italics. True the chances of being taken to court were small and the chances of losing the court case were even smaller. Yet if they were taken to court it would be expensive and embarrassing. Why risk it? Surely it would be worth a few thousand pounds just to change the logo.

That, you see, is how laws work. In the main, they don’t proceed by telling you what to do and prosecuting you when you don’t do it. They get you to do the work. You decide that even running the smallest chance of legal proceedings isn’t worth the risk. You may as well just fall in line.

In every swimming pool, public library, school and hospital in the land staff are imposing regulations that go beyond the intent of the original framers of the law. Just in case. You can never be too careful, you see. Don’t want any legal problems, do we?

The question of whether we gold-plate (in other words add unnecessarily to) EU regulations can be answered in the same way. The real gold-plating isn’t done by the law makers, it’s done by the law takers. It’s done by us.

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.

daniel.finkelstein@thetimes.co.uk

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