Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

I intervene early and apologise for trying to pre-empt the right reverend Prelate. He made some valuable points; first, the general point that this issue needs a lot of further thought. As I think he put it, whenever we see a criminal justice Bill we see a hotchpotch of things added by the Government, some of which need considerably greater thought—a classic example of something that this House is good at. Bearing in mind that the Government are anxious to save a bit of time on this Bill, when the Minister comes to respond he might want to take the amendment away, give it some further thought—possibly send it to a Select Committee, or whatever—and bring it back having done so. More generally, following on from what both the Liberal Democrat spokesmen had to say about the Bill, there is a difficult point about definitions and subjectivity and objectivity. We are all agreed on certain things. For example, we probably all take what I might describe as the Mrs Patrick Campbell view of these things: we do not mind what appears, so long as it does not frighten the horses. Our problem is that we cannot quite define what does frighten the horses. That is what we must identify in the amendment, and why the Government’s wording is being amended from, "““it appears to have been produced solely or principally for the purpose of sexual arousal””," to, "““is of such a nature that it must reasonably be assumed””" to. That is why the Liberal Democrats are rightly suggesting that ““appears to have”” is changed to something more precise, such as ““has””. It is a question of defining what exactly is frightening the horses, by which I mean creating some public mischief rather than just being something that might offend me or the Liberal Democrats—or even the Government. This is obviously a difficult issue. I notice the Minister looking hard at his papers and wondering about it. No doubt he will respond in due course. I go back to my original point of whether he might want to take the amendment away and bring it back on some other occasion after we have had some further thought about it and about how properly to define the mischief we are trying to address.