It seems to me that legislation and indeed policy or procedures have ignored certain things that we need to be reminded of. The first is conscience: that is why I mentioned conscience as something that had been rediscovered because of Christian teaching in the 13th century. But we are now in danger of forgetting its importance. Indeed, British lawmaking has often recognised the place of conscience: conscientious objection during times of war is recognised; people, even in the Second World War, were exempted from combat and given other jobs to do. Even the 1967 Abortion Act, which in many other respects I deplore, recognised conscience in exempting people because of their beliefs from taking part in procedures that may lead to the termination of a pregnancy. But now in this most recent spate of equality legislation, conscience has not been recognised. Why is that? Why have we reached a stage where conscience is no longer important? It's not just that it's been forgotten or neglected because when it has been pleaded; when people have said, "I can't do this because of conscience," the courts have not recognised it. In every instance, freedom of expression and of association has been trumped by certain notions of equality.

I realise that you can't take conscience of every kind, in every way, in every case, into account. But we are talking about the consciences of those who stand in well-formed spiritual and moral traditions. I'm talking about the Christian churches. Jewish people may want to talk about their traditions and Muslims theirs, and so on, so we are not just talking about an eccentric exercise of conscience but a well-formed one.

Second, what has been ignored is the idea of reasonable accommodation. This is not particularly a British idea but an American one. It has come out of the First Amendment to the American Constitution on Freedom of Belief, and also the Civil Rights Act of the 20th century. There is a huge amount of case law in the United States which recognises religious belief, the expression of religious belief and the need for people to manifest their belief at their place of work. In some cases there has been accommodation of even unreasonable belief, or at least that's how it seems to me. But in Britain we have a peculiarly Benthamite "the law is the law is the law" mentality. The difficulty with legal positivism is how to change bad law. In every age and every clime there have been laws that have been bad and people have struggled and campaigned to have them changed. What is wrong with that — even to recognise the possibility of mistakes? With this most recent legislation, however, I have been told at the highest levels that because the legislation has been passed, nothing further can be done about it.

Well, I think something can be done. Conscience can be recognised, reasonable accommodation at the workplace and in public life can be made, provided it does not jeopardise the business in which the employer is engaged or the business of public life. This can be applied to particular cases. Take the case of the registrar who asked to be excused from having to conduct civil partnership ceremonies: plenty of other registrars were willing to preside at such ceremonies. There was no threat of any jeopardy for what the law was now asking, and it may be that a registrar who was not willing to preside at such ceremonies could be given extra duties or other duties, but reasonable accommodation was not made. Similarly with the counsellor who, as I understand it, was willing to offer non-directive counselling to homosexual couples, but was not willing to offer them sex therapy. He was willing to go as far as it was possible for him to go with integrity. For those who wanted such sex therapy, there would be other counsellors in the organisation who could offer such therapy, and reasonable accommodation could therefore be made, but it wasn't.