The Queen was in the Palace of Westminster on Wednesday to formally open the new session of Parliament. It was a rather unusual event because, for various practical reasons, there was not the same level of pomp. She arrived in a car rather than a carriage and gave her speech to Parliament wearing a hat rather than her crown. It was also unusual because it opened a two rather than a one year session of Parliament and was given in the context of considerable uncertainty given the absence of any deal between the minority Conservative Government and another party.

From the perspective of the media, the headline news from the Queen’s Speech was that it contained 8 Bills dealing with different aspects of Brexit. However, from CARE’s perspective, the big news was what was not in the Speech.

The 2015 Queen’s Speech contained a commitment to introducing an ‘Extremism Bill’ which would include ‘Extremism Disruption Orders’ to tackle people promoting non-violent as well as violent extremism. This caused significant free speech concerns across a broad spectrum of civil society because all manner of views and opinions could be defined as ‘non-violent extremism’ including the expression of counter-cultural Christian points of view. However, the Government had the greatest difficulty coming up with a definition of extremism and the 2015-16 Parliament passed without the publication of the promised Bill.

The 2016 Queen’s Speech contained a commitment to introducing an ‘Extremism and Safeguarding Bill’ and the official background notes on the Bill made it clear that this would also include provisions to give effect to the Government’s proposals to regulate any Out of School Education Settings providing education for 6 hours or more a week. This meant that some churches and para-church organisations would have to be regulated by the state which raised extensive additional concerns about state interference in Christian teaching. Again, the Government – not surprisingly – struggled to define extremism and again we got to the end of the 2016-17 parliamentary year without the publication of the Bill.

We were therefore delighted that there was no reference to any Extremism Bill in the 2017 Queen’s Speech. It would seem that the proposal has, for the moment anyway, been dropped. In its place, the Queen’s Speech made a commitment to introduce a Counter Extremism Commission charged with responsibility for identifying all examples of extremism and to advise the Government on how best to respond. To the extent that such a body is charged with responsibility for identifying non-violent extremism, it will be a cause of concern for many.

We recognise, especially after the sad events of this year, that the Government needs to take robust steps to deal with violent extremism – terrorism. However, this urgent imperative is not well served by diverting scarce resources away from terrorism to pursue a category of non-violent extremism that will inevitably include many law-abiding Christians as well as other peaceful groups with passionately held beliefs.

CARE will be monitoring this situation carefully.