In Westminster, a proposed new law on incitement to religious hatred has survived a hostile first stage debate. In Belfast, the incitement to hatred law is decades old and long recognised as useless.
At this time of year the very air incites to hatred, filled as it too often is with the sound of marching bands commemorating the ancient triumph of Protestants over Catholics, and the crack of petrol-bombs.
In one rural district police are said to be advising businesses to leave wooden pallets outside their gates - the unspoken message being that otherwise trespassers will break and enter to collect for Eleventh Night bonfires. Small boys struggle home at random hours of day or night beneath toppling piles of wood - the sole half-way endearing glimpse of the marching season for many.
Why be offended by flutes and drums? Ask anybody who ever heard the Orange "Tour of the North" - the major parade every other year through bitterly divided north Belfast - strike up the Sash as it slowed for maximum effect past St Patrick's chapel in Donegall Street.
The Twelfth should be a tourist magnet, unionists often say, a widely-loved Mardi Gras. If only republicans didn't whip up resentment and nationalist commentators didn't misrepresent a rich culture, they say; if only Catholics didn't go out of their way to be offended.
Catholics who love Orange marches are as few today as always, needing no tuition. The many Protestants who feel similarly keep very quiet indeed, and for good reason.
There is nothing winsome about July if your house is downwind of a mountain of burning tyres or smack next-door to bonfire preparations that go on for months.
One of Belfast's most sprawling sites is directly in front of a mural that instructs the neighbourhood to "protect the future of our Protestant children". How then to complain about the shifts of often boozy minders who take nightly turns sitting on battered settees to guard their haul?
A culture that must be respected? It has taken delicate local negotiations and the disintegration of loyalist paramilitaries to tidy up bonfires and reduce the summer outburst of threatening graffiti and flags along major roads and in mixed estates.
The annual arguments over marching routes are tiresome beyond measure, perhaps to most of the population. But the Slugger O'Toole website is alight with debate on the merits of a culture centred on marching, the malice or otherwise of objectors. And former SDLP politician Brian Feeney, a gladiator who doesn't so much trail coats as flick his targets on the nose with them, led his Irish News column this week with derision for new Ulster Unionist leader Sir Reg Empey's starter promise: that "no permanent settlement" is possible "until disputes over parades are resolved". The Slugger site will soon have postings calling Feeney sectarian and supercilious and others saying he's absolutely correct, while a gentle soul urges them to "play the ball, not the man".
Feeney sat for years in Belfast Council with the new UU leader, and saw this as a vain attempt to woo back hardline votes from Ian Paisley, sad because Empey is "genuinely not sectarian. Have a titter of wit, Reg, the voters you want watch the burning vehicles caused by parades being pushed through Catholic districts on CNN and Sky, in Marbella and Paphos and Lanzarote."
In the first substantial uproar of the season leading republicans might as well have headed for Lanzarote as try to stop Ardoyne rioters - many no older than 10 or 12, some clearly younger. "The sheer purity of the hatred was a wonder to behold," said a seasoned, disgruntled reporter who failed to avoid flying stones. "Martians could land in Ardoyne tomorrow and the only question would be which tentacle they kicked with."
A fortnight on, the local mood still bubbles like a minor but active volcano. People with no liking for the Provos think they did their best as peacemakers though their hearts weren't in it, and they may not do it again: "No wonder - effectively helping to push through a march nobody there wants."
Some see tough decisions ahead for Sinn Féin "if they ever get into PSNI uniform".
Uprooting incitement to hatred North of the Border will take more than legislation, even if well-drafted. It took only two prosecutions to expose the limitations of the 1970 Act. The first was of John McKeague, an early icon of loyalist militancy. Prosecuted for publishing a song with the lyrics: "You've never seen a better Taig than with a bullet in his back," he was acquitted because he denied intent to incite.
Glasgow-born Belfast councillor George Seawright, who told a City Hall meeting that the council should buy an incinerator "to burn Catholics and their priests" was convicted, but then he admitted he was "an honest bigot".
His open encouragement for loyalist violence helped to get him killed by a long-disappeared republican splinter group, the IPLO.