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Mental Health Bill [Lords]

I entirely agree. There was a slightly watered-down version of the same attack in the Sunday People, which I believe is a sister newspaper. I use the term ““newspaper”” loosely. It quoted the Minister, who I hope will disassociate herself entirely from that article and the misrepresenting comments contained in it. I should be happy to hand it over to her. It does no one any justice: it certainly does no justice to the newspaper, and—as my hon. Friend rightly and articulately said—it does no justice to the people whom we are here to help and whom the Bill is intended to help. We have spent a great deal of time trying to achieve that. Amendment No. 91 is an updated version of an amendment that was passed with a heavy majority by members of the House of Lords in all parties. Its purpose is to provide some exclusions from what has now become a much-extended definition of mental disorder. It would replace the exclusion for dependence on alcohol and drugs with a more appropriately worded exclusion to cover a state of acute intoxication falling short of dependence, reinstate the exclusion clause in the 1983 to cover sexual preferences, substitute for the existing exclusion for immoral conduct a more generic clause to prevent mental health law from being used as a form of social control, and respond to the evidence that people from ethic communities, particularly black communities, are disproportionately subjected to the Act by providing a specific exclusion to help address the problem. When we have discussed this proposal in the past, the Minister has suggested that it would be a lawyers’ charter and that it would not address the issue of paedophilia, which is obviously of serious concern. The fear has been expressed that paedophiles would escape through a loophole. That is why subsection (2) states"““Nothing in this section shall be construed to cover paedophilia.””" We have made the position much clearer than it needs to be in order to explain it in language that is clear to everyone, which even the political editor of the Sunday Mirror—if he bothered to check his facts properly—might comprehend and take on board, perhaps even apologising for his scurrilous claims next Sunday.