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Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

My Lords, I hope my noble friend will be able to look sympathetically at the wisdom and good sense in the amendment. It has clearly been thoroughly thought about within the Joint Committee on Human Rights and we should do the committee the courtesy of demonstrating that we are thinking about it equally seriously. One slight doubt about the circumstances in which the amendment would become relevant is how far, in a real situation of this kind, which can become pretty heated, people will sit around saying, ““What is reasonable? Now, wait a minute, I can act only reasonably, so what is reasonable?””, work that out and then take action. I have a slight anxiety about what would really happen in the heat of the moment. However, that makes it all the more important for the law to be very clear that in a highly charged situation people cannot simply take the law into their own hands. ““Reasonable”” applies in every sense, not least for the person doing what he genuinely believes is reasonable. This is a highly charged and quite emotional area. There is a lot of media comment, much of which is out to work up emotion on the issue. If the media are very anxious to work up emotion on this and to have a simplistic emotional justification for anything that someone might do, it is all the more important for the law to emphasise that anything that happens must be reasonable and must be believed by the person doing it to be reasonable. The amendment has raised a very important point and I should like to hear some assurance from my noble friend in his response.