Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

I entirely share the intention of the mover of the amendment, but the question is whether and why one should single out this form of threat and put it in the Bill. Once you start to do that, you lose the whole basis on which the legislation has been framed, which is to allow context. Words which in one context can be non-threatening in another context can be very threatening. It seems to me that the law is precisely framed as proposed to allow the court to judge context. Once you start to spell out context, you get into the sort of difficulties that are being alluded to. There is an interesting parallel here, because the law as proposed is modelled on the offence of incitement to religious hatred. Because of well-publicised cases of the abuse of children by clergy—I am glad to say not mainly clergy of my denomination or of this country—and because of that association in the news, clergy not uncommonly get that sort of abuse hurled at them. I have known it myself. Simply because of wearing a dog collar, someone makes that sort of allegation. I find that very distasteful, but I would not want that to be used as the basis of a criminal prosecution. It seems to me that that is going too far, and I would not want that to happen. Because these offences by their nature are so contextual, it seems to me that once you start to spell out the context, you wrap the thing up in an inappropriate way.