Heather Bellamy spoke with Ciaran Kelly, the Head of Communications at the Christian Institute about the Equality Oath, Extremism Disruption Orders and Ofsted's intention to inspect churches.

I'm not passing comment on what the Government's intention behind this is, I'm just spelling out the fact that these are the things they've said and this is the approach they've taken.

Heather: What place do you think personal conscience should have in the public square? Because all of our consciences are slightly different in terms of what we see as right and wrong, or what we feel comfortable doing or not doing. In terms of our work and jobs, to what extent should our personal conscience be accommodated?

Ciaran: There is a well understood standard of reasonable accommodation. I may have views on all sorts of things and I cannot necessarily expect my employer to bend over backwards to accommodate my particular views on things. However, within law there is the notion of reasonable accommodation, that there might be a middle ground. There are certain steps that can be taken, where if I'm in a particular role, and classic examples in recent years have been people who are marriage registrars who have issues with civil partnerships, or had issues with same-sex marriage, where they're not saying there is nothing in their role that they can do, but where an accommodation could be made such that they are not put in the position of having to go against their conscience in order to do their work. The employers should have an obligation and a responsibility to make an effort to accommodate those views.

It's not a carte blanche for anybody to get away with anything at any time; there's a sensible middle ground that employees and employers can get to, because conscience is important for many people, not least Christians. It might be to do with abortion, or marriage, where they have to choose between what their employers are asking them to do and what their conscience would ask of them and there can be routes around that. That's what reasonable accommodation is about.

Heather: It's almost like the Government, with this Equality Oath and British values, wants them to act as a corporate conscience. Do you think nations always need a corporate conscience and will always end up with a set of shared values?

Ciaran: We can talk about shared values, but as soon as you start legislating for those in any kind of way, there are going to be people who fall outside those and that's really where the problem is.

We are a country that holds democracy to be important; it's not our invention, I think the Greeks came up with it, but that's not uniquely British. Queueing might be a British value, but if people don't queue, are we going to take action against them beyond tutting and raised eyebrows? That's where the danger starts to come. We can start laying out values of any kind and politicians do it all the time, the difference comes when you start to take decisions off the back of those that affect people, or you marginalise people by setting these things out, or you legislate that you have to subscribe to this corporate conscience, this set of values, otherwise there's going to be repercussions.

One British value that we pride ourselves on has been individual liberty and the freedom of expression and they have been British values for a long time, where people can hold different views and discuss those and argue about those. If they do not go against the law and if they are not directly harmful to others under the law, then people are able to hold those views. Even during the war, there were people of Communist views. They were able to hold those views even at a time of extreme national crisis.

What is happening and the Equality Oath is an example of this, is this intention to conform people to quite a vague set of rules that the Government of the day have decided are the things that they want to hold out above all others. You create this hierarchy of rights where equality is then used as a stick to beat those who have a different perspective on things such as marriage and various other things.

By all means talk about having a national conscience and a corporate conscience, but don't start putting that into law in the way that the Government is talking about.