Well, no, I think the praise you're getting is for the notion that we have moved along the way towards codification. I'm just encouraging us to move further in that direction.
I don't think we could ever get rid of all matters of interpretation. It's certainly true that there will be scope for deciding what a particular word means and what Parliament had in mind. To use your illustration, clearly, “clergyman” would have to be interpreted as first of all not a reference to the male gender, and secondly not about a Judeo-Christian religion. Sure, we'll always have interpretation, but my concern is much deeper than that. It's not that it's interpretation but that we actually put obstacles in the path of allowing courts to interpret by setting up three or four contradictory rules, all of which govern exactly the same situation. That's what I'm trying to avoid.