I really don't think it fair that the Telegraph Media Group should have to stand alone in facing a complaint to the press regulator about insulting the Orange Order.

A member of the Ulster Unionist Party is upset because Colin Freeman, in a dispatch from Iraq, wrote about a convoy of Shia militiamen passing along a Baghdad street, adding:

"Rather like Belfast's Orange parades, the militiamen have no compunction about driving through neighbourhoods already stained by past sectarian bloodshed."

This prompted Stephen Nicholl, a unionist councillor, to complain to the Press Complaints Commission on the grounds that Freeman's comparison between a Shia militia and the bowler-hatted Orangemen was "inaccurate and wholly irresponsible."

I don't imagine he will convince the commissioners that Freeman and/or the Telegraph were in breach of the editors' code of practice. The complaint is wholly without merit.

Freeman's analogy was merited because that's what the Orange institution does and, if not prevented by the Parades Commission, would seek to do more often.

It is an avowedly anti-Catholic organisation that exacerbates tensions by marching through areas in Northern Ireland in which Catholics live.

Here's the opening statement of the constitution of the Loyal Orange Institution of Ireland: "This institution is composed of Protestants... It is exclusively an association of the Reformation."

Qualification of candidates: "An Orangeman... should strenuously oppose the fatal errors and doctrines of the Church of Rome." And no member may marry a "Papist".

In order to underline their separation from non-Protestants the Orange are very keen to shout anti-Papist slogans and sing anti-Papist songs on streets where only Catholics dwell.

I am not a Catholic (nor a Protestant, nor a Muslim for that matter) but it strikes me, as it must have done Colin Freeman, that this Orange activity foments sectarianism.

And the PCC complainant, Nicholl, might like to reflect on the fact that those parades are more irresponsible than Freeman's wholly reasonable, and accurate, analogy.