Racial and Religious Hatred Bill

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point. There are in the world today—and, indeed, in this country—groups who have founded their political agenda on religious principles. Indeed, in Europe, the Christian Democrats did exactly that for a long time. So the two concepts are closely linked, but one of the questions that the Minister failed completely to answer in Committee was how we should disentangle them. I do not think that they can be disentangled. The Minister falls back on the argument that the disentanglement will be done by the poor old Attorney-General, who, when confronted with a set of facts, will decide whether they transgress or exceed the mark. The Minister knows my view on this: it is very unsatisfactory to create a legislative framework that is wholly incomprehensible to the wider public and leaves them at the mercy of a single individual who sits in his office and decides whether they have overstepped the mark. I fear, too, that when prosecutions start, this approach will lead to all sorts of allegations that the Attorney-General is being selective and protecting certain religious groups and not others. I defy the Minister: even the Attorney-General, a man who would seek to apply a great measure of dispassionate assessment to any problem that he faced, could not fail to be swayed by societal considerations about what is or is not a mainstream point of view.