Equality Bill

I am delighted to hear the noble Lord, Lord Elton, using Latin because he may not know that since the reforms of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, I am not allowed to use Latin in court any more. I am not even allowed to use "writ" because that is considered to be not user-friendly, so I have to say "claim form". I continue to say "writ" and I continue to use Latin, and I am very glad that he has done so as well. Of course, I am sympathetic to the idea that we should legislate to deal with all forms of bullying, but in this Bill we are dealing with equality of treatment without discrimination on specified grounds. What I seek to do is more modest; that is, to make sure that bullying harassment on those grounds covers all the grounds and not only some of them. The expression noscitur a sociis—if one is showing off—might just as well apply, in the sense that in looking at the whole of what one is talking about, it is completely irrational to give the message, except through this convoluted stuff, that homophobic bullying in a school is not to be treated in the same way as racial bullying. That is the rather modest thing we are trying to do.