HIGNFY

Ian Hislop surprised me on Have I Got News For You (HIGNFY) recently because more often than not I agree with the editor of Private Eye who, by and large, speaks a lot of common sense.

But he went off the rails with some rather ill-judged comments about the Ashers bakery 'gay cake' row by inviting viewers to consider what would happen if someone went into a Muslim bakery and asked for a cake portraying an image of the Prophet Mohammed which would run counter to many Muslims religious beliefs.

Now this isn't really a good example of how the law on discrimination works at all because if someone sets up a business which is advertised as conforming to certain religious or other accepted norms, then they can't be expected to accept just any any request that a potential customer makes.

So a Halal restaurant could not be forced to serve a customer alcohol, nor could a Christian bookshop be expected to sell someone 'top shelf' magazines or works about the history of Judaism or Islam.

The difference in the Ashers bakery case is that they were not holding themselves out to be a religious business of any kind, probably because it's not always good idea to box yourself into such a small commercial corner depending on your target market, of course.

Instead Ashers were trying to 'have their cake and eat it" so to speak and they took the chap's order and accepted his money at the time, only to renege on baking the cake at a later date, possibly after communing with God.

So the answer is that if Ahsers want to wear their religious hearts on their sleeve and clarify their terms of business, they're free to do what they like so long as they don't say they refuse to serve Muslims, Jews and Catholics which would be against the law.

Otherwise the law is quite clear and applied with a bit of common sense there's no need for anyone to get their knickers in a terrible twist - including Private Eye and Ian Hislop.