I think the worrying aspect is the idea that certain people in positions of power and influence - like the police - are so obsessed by political correctness, that they feel even the implication of some sort of racist behaviour or mischaracterisation of certain groups is a worse crime than some elements of our society promoting murder and violence. And I think this is deeply wrongheaded. Some arms of government and their obsession with being politically correct can lead to a form of appeasement of people of violence, which is very bad for a civilised way of life.

MB: I'd be interested in just hearing from Luke, the precise steps whereby the police ended up making a complaint to Ofcom. I mean, it's not for the police to comment on the quality of a television programme, so who actually did it? Did they do it off their own bat, or did someone egg them on?

LJ: The answer is they haven't explained...

MB: I bet they haven't.

LJ: In the immediate aftermath we were concerned that we were possibly going to be prosecuted, but we were robust in our defence, and we were right to be, but it ultimately cost the taxpayer a lot of money: their legal fees, our legal fees and damages too. Has one heard of a single disciplinary procedure or someone being sacked for squandering taxpayers' assets like that, and wasting everyone's time with some completely madcap attempt to inhibit legitimate reporting? No. So I am very pleased that the coverage given to it was extensive, and it was affirmation that organisations like Channel 4 are entirely right to do careful, well researched, legitimate reporting into this sort of behaviour, because that is what investigative journalism is about, and why it is an important part of a free society. In many of the countries of the sort you mentioned earlier, like Algeria, Colombia, Venezuela or Russia, inhibition of the press is one of the signs of a totalitarian regime, or a criminal regime. And coming back to the fact that essentially we live in a law-abiding society, having a very rigorous and free press and media broadcast is a very important part of our way of life.

MB: I was talking to Peter Clarke, the former head of the counter-terrorism police, the other night and he said that he rather endorsed my view in my book, Blood and Rage that we are essentially dealing with a lot of very angry people, and that the ideology is a bit of a camouflage for an underlying pathology. I'm very interested in how these emotions are manipulated. You saw it in the case of the Danish cartoons of Muhammad, where the time lag between the publishing of the cartoons, and adding in some images that didn't belong there in the first place, and then the explosion of anger, and the burnings of flags, and people being killed, and the boycotting of Danish products all over the Middle East. It took some time to crank that up, and the people who manipulate these situations are at least as worthy of attention as the perpetrators of actual violence.