Moderation is intended to ensure the process is fair and inclusive, and will not be used to suppress legitimate, reasoned debate about the issues raised.

We welcome public comments on our work and opinion pieces. Comments will normally be approved for publication as long as they:

• Respect other commenters and individuals. Comments should not be malicious or offensive in nature, and should not constitute a personal attack on a person’s character;
• Don’t incite hatred on the basis of race, religion, gender, nationality or sexuality or other personal characteristic;
• Don’t include swearing, hate-speech or obscenity;
• Don’t publicly reveal personal details, such as private addresses, phone numbers or email addresses;
• Don’t break the law. This includes libel, condoning illegal activity, and breaking copyright;
• Don’t comment or give details in relation to individual cases;
• Are reasonably concise, and don’t constitute spamming of this service;
• Don’t advertise commercial products and services. You may mention relevant products and services as long as they support your comment;
• Don’t impersonate or falsely claim to represent a person or organisation;
• Are in English. Unfortunately, we do not currently have the resource to moderate comments in other languages;
• Are on-topic and within the scope of the invitation to comment. Please don’t post messages that are unrelated to this channel;
• Are not principally party political in nature;
• Don’t contain unrelated or inappropriate links to external sites.

Comments appear on the site for discussion, and may or may not receive a reply. To contact us, please use the email address provided.

You should remember that you are legally responsible for what you write. By submitting a comment you undertake to indemnify us against any liability arising from that comment, including breach of confidentiality or copyright, or any obscene, defamatory, seditious, blasphemous or other actionable statement you may make.

If you are aged 16 or under, you may want to talk to your parent/guardian about the ideas on this website and the opinions that you want to express. Please don’t leave any personal details that might identify you (apart from in the email address box, which won’t be published anyway), and you may want to use your first or last name only, rather than your full name.

Moderators reserve the right to suspend comments at any time. Where a comment is not published for a reason other than those listed above, the site moderators will endeavour to reply to the commenter by email explaining their reasons and inviting them to make appropriate changes so that the comment can be reconsidered.