When I began my work some three and half years ago, I had imagined most of it would be overseas. It has not turned out exactly to be so. I have been drawn, more and more, into what is happening in Britain. In the House of Lords there is a room called the Hume Room, where you can go and get public school-type lunches quite cheaply. The only condition is that you sit at the very next vacant chair at the dining table, so you find yourself sitting next to all sorts of people you wouldn't otherwise meet. I found myself sitting next to a gentleman who, after a while, said, "Bishop, I've a confession to make." So I said, "Well, I'm always willing to hear confessions." He then said that he had been part of the campaign for the Sunday Trading Bill in England. And he said, "I have to say now that that was the biggest mistake that I made in my political life." It had, he now believed, destroyed a common day for the family, and it meant the poorer sections of society would be the ones who would be forced to work because the wealthier people could always take the day off, if they wished to do so. I found his outburst quite revealing and I wish there were more mea culpas of this kind. But in spite of an intervention by myself, a court has ruled recently that Christians have no right to ask for time off for worship and fellowship with other Christians on Sunday. And in fact my intervention was used in a sense that I had not intended at all — to establish this case that they were making. The result will be that poorer people will be forced to work on Sundays. Poorer Christians, younger Christians, will be forced to do this and not be able to go to church. We have actual cases that have already occurred. 

Then there is the legislation against hate speech. It is true that the legislation was at the last minute improved, in the House of Lords as it happens, to recognise to some extent legitimate activities of preaching, evangelism, criticism and so forth. Nevertheless, it has already been used to prevent people preaching, evangelising or simply exercising their right of free speech in public, such as policemen saying to a Christian evangelist in a large British city: "You can't preach here. This is a Muslim area." In several other cases, where people have simply been quoting the Bible or even where a quotation from the Bible has appeared on a screen, this has led to their arrest and the threat of prosecution. There are people who have had personal experience of having said something on the radio and then, by the time they got home, the police were waiting for them. 

Then there are those Christians and Christian bodies who feel that equality legislation is such that they cannot in conscience agree with some of the things that those who have legislated for equality in this way are asking of them. The closure of the Catholic adoption agencies is an example. They had been doing valuable work for 150 years, placing difficult children in adoptive homes. They were not allowed even this exemption, which is all that they were asking for, that they be allowed to continue working as before, placing children with stable married couples. They weren't asking for anything new, and they were not allowed to do that. 

There are now more than a hundred cases where, for reasons of conscience, people have lost their jobs or their place in public life, on panels of experts, on the magistrates' bench, and their registration with professional bodies. It seems to me that this is a growing phenomenon. This is not going to decrease; it will increase in terms of people who will be affected. And what are we going to do about it? It is no use comparing it with the severe persecution which Christians and others experience in some countries. If you lose your job or your place in the community, that must feel like persecution to those who are affected.