---

Equality Bill [HL]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness for explaining exactly what the amendments do, as I thought it was surprising to prohibit discrimination between persons of the same religion; it had not occurred to me before. I want to ask her a couple of questions on that. Presumably the provision might mean, for example, that Sunni Muslims would not be able to discriminate against Shia Muslims or vice versa. It should not inhibit discrimination between different branches of Christianity. It would not be for me to interfere and think of examples of that, but there was a recent case in the Jewish religion when the orthodox Jewish authorities, in the person of the Chief Rabbi, seemed to discriminate against a boy by refusing him admission to a faith school on the grounds that his mother’s religious practices after her conversion were in his opinion inadequate for that school. I wondered at the time whether that was proper or somewhat extreme; I do not know, but would it be caught by the amendment?