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The common law offences of blasphemy and blasphemous libel were finally abolished in 2008; however, trenchant criticism of religion (most frequently, but by no means exclusively, of Christianity) has been fundamental to intellectual thought and debate in this country and in the West for the last several centuries, and those who have undertaken such criticism include such eminent thinkers as Baruch Spinoza, Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine and George Bernard Shaw. I hope the committee does not, by its adoption of the term "Islamophobia", intend to suggest that trenchant criticism of Islam or of any other religion constitutes an irrational "phobia": to do so, and to enshrine this line of thinking in law, would be to re-introduce, by the back door so to speak, blasphemy laws possibly considerably more draconian than those that were only recently abolished.