Racial and Religious Hatred Bill

My Lords, I speak this afternoon as somebody who owned and ran two bookshops for several years. I am very concerned about the effect that the Bill will have on the book trade. The book trade is fundamental to the exchange and nurturing of ideas. This vital trade is under threat from several directions, but especially from the Bill. I am not alone in this belief. As many noble Lords will know, Pen, the Society of Authors, is running a campaign. Many authors feel as I do about this. I am not sure that the Government understand the role of the book trade in nurturing ideas and debate. I agree with Boyd Tonkin, who wrote in the Independent on 12 August that,"““Whole decades can pass between one mention of bookshops by a British prime minister and the next. How sad, then, that Tony Blair should refer to the sale of literature only when he aims to censor it””." The Bill is a large step away from freedom of speech because publishers and booksellers are at risk of being criminalised for their activities in publishing, distributing, offering for sale or even displaying books that may be seen as controversial, or even offensive. But in a society that values freedom of speech and debate such books form a vital part of that debate. Apart from books that have already been published and are available for sale, I am more concerned about the future effect that the Bill will have on the book trade. The woolly and ill-defined nature of what publications will be caught by the Bill will have a chilling effect across the book trade. Who would be willing to be associated with promoting or distributing books that might be caught by the Bill? It will mean that a bookseller will have to risk a criminal prosecution with up to seven years in gaol if he chooses to sell an item that later proves to be caught by this legislation. Alternatively, he can choose not to stock any controversial item that might be deemed to fall within the parameters of the Bill, or that might be deemed to do so after agitation by extremist groups. That will lead to us becoming a nation where bookshops’ stocks are a bland mixture of books on how to boil an egg or mend a bike. There will be fewer and fewer books on the really gritty, difficult issues that society needs to face and debate. Big chain bookshops do not find such books very profitable and it will be far easier for them to play it safe and sell a heap of egg-boiling books rather than risk some outraged religious fanatic pushing the authorities to prosecute them for selling something he does not agree with. The small independent bookseller is facing enough problems just to stay in business. He will not be in a position to face such a risk. The British literary world was shocked by the fact that Orhan Pamuk now faces trial in Turkey for his descriptions of the Armenian massacres that occurred some hundred years ago. But under the Bill it is quite possible that a novel recounting a fictionalised version of horrendous events perpetrated by one religious group upon another could be deemed to be inflammatory. As a bookseller for several years, I can remember all too clearly the ridiculous Spycatcher débâcle and the speed with which Special Branch visited my shop on hearing that it had a copy in the window. If the Bill goes through as it is, with so little clarification of what may be caught by it, with no provision for what my noble friend Lord Lester called ““immediacy””—the imminence with which something may have an effect—many more such visits will be paid to bookshops. Many books will never be published and debate will be stifled. That threat to free speech is far more dangerous than the threat outlined so far by the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor this afternoon.