Online Communication Offence Arrests

Lord Strathcarron Excerpts

Thursday 17th July 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Strathcarron (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Lebedev, for this debate. I declare an interest as an author and publisher. With the noble Lord’s blessing, I should like to extend the Question from freedom of speech to freedom of expression, as non-crime hate incidents, which I believe are in scope of the Question, affect the written word just as much as the spoken word. I am talking about authors rather than journalists or users of social media.

Apart from targeting high-profile authors such as JK Rowling, the mere existence of non-crime hate incidents has a deterring effect on all authors’ freedom of expression, not because they have committed a crime—after all, we are talking specifically about a non-crime—but because non-crimes nevertheless affect authors through the three first cousins of non-crime hate incidents: cancel culture, which can ruin an author’s career; the empowering of the Twitter mob, who can endanger an author’s physical safety and mental well-being; and mealy-mouthed publishers employing sensitivity readers to scour texts for anything that someone somewhere might find offensive and use non-crime hate incidents and its first cousins in retaliation, thus stifling freedom of expression.

Fortunately for those of us who believe in free markets, although the censors may have the first word, the readers often have the last word. After Puffin Books sanitised Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, there was outrage from not just literary figures of all persuasions but even politicians, such as the generational smoking ban enthusiast Rishi Sunak. Customers voted with their bookmarks and, consequently, the rereleased original version by Penguin Classics continues to outsell the neutered Puffin version by three to one—but still it persists.

As a publisher, I have a worrying example in front of me now: a title called The History of Islamic Art, written by an Oxford University postgraduate. The work includes a study of images depicting the Prophet Mohammed. As the book points out, and as is well known by Islamic scholars—including the Koranic scholar who addressed the Islamophobia meeting that many of us here were at yesterday—the banning of such images is a fairly recent Sunni phenomenon. The fact is that such portrayals continue to this day among the Shia and other sects. However, such is the febrile atmosphere created by non-crime hate incidents and its cousins that Oxford University Press turned the book down purely in fear of a reaction to it by the student mob. I am pleased to say that we are going to publish it—and with an American co-edition, so the book will enjoy a far wider circulation than it would otherwise have had. Again, this is proof that censorship is counterproductive for those who propose it.

Talking of counterproductivity, I agree with Sir Andy Marsh, the chief constable of the College of Policing, who addressed many of those of us who are here, as members of the free speech Peers’ group, about three months ago. Last month, he said that non-crime hate incidents should be scrapped and that police officers should refocus on crime rather than non-crime. It is not as though non-crime hate incidents actually do any good. As freedom of information requests have shown, there is no evidence at all that, nationally, they are even logged properly or prevent crime.

Scrapping them would also help the police recover their reputation as they become a laughing stock in their overreaction to thought crime while leaving real crime more or less completely undetected. It has got to the stage where, if you have been burgled, the police will not come round unless you also tweet that the burglar was in some way being dishonest, in which case half the force will descend on you. The problem that the Minister might address—apart from encouraging the Home Secretary, who seems worryingly keen on non-crime hate incidents—is that different forces completely ignore the College of Policing’s guidance. This begs the question, “What is the point of the College of Policing in the first place?”, but that is a question for another day.

Climate Agenda

Lord Strathcarron Excerpts

Thursday 24th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Strathcarron (Con)]

My Lords, I too am grateful to my noble friend Lord Lilley for securing this debate. The main impact of the Government’s climate agenda is to import pollution and to export jobs, growth and prosperity, and the two are directly linked.

Turning first to importing pollution, since 1990 our share of CO₂ emissions embedded in imports has risen from just over 10% to nearly 50%. The very fact that we import half our emissions should give us pause for thought, but, unfortunately, we are moving in the opposite direction. The decision to cease all new oil and gas licences can only mean that, in future, we will need to import even more oil and gas to make up for our own self-induced shortfalls.

Whether we like it or not, fossil fuels are here to stay for the foreseeable future. Even the Government’s own assessment suggests that, by 2040, the demand for natural gas will decrease by only 4%. This simply means that any domestic reduction in emissions will be made possible only by offshoring the production, and of course the jobs, to other countries. Furthermore, the imported fuels will need to be liquefied—itself a polluting process, alongside the emissions caused by shipping them here—and then there is further pollution from processing them after they have landed here.

While Ministers may be able to stand up at international conferences and proudly proclaim that our domestic emissions have reduced, these same policies have in fact only contributed to increasing global emissions. One might say that, as we produce only 1% of the world’s emissions, it does not really matter and that the gesture is more important than the reality. However, it is a mighty counterproductive gesture with a direct, negative impact on our standard of living and quality of life.

Turning to jobs, growth and prosperity, as has been well publicised, the UK now has the highest industrial electricity prices in the developed world, which is directly caused by artificially penalising industrial and domestic consumers with subsidies for renewable energy, carbon pricing and the extra infrastructure costs as a direct result of the policy. The OBR suggests that subsidies for renewables will add £12 billion to our bills for this year alone—and it will only get worse as we factor in future renewable subsidies and the £100 billion grid upgrade needed for decarbonisation.

To give an indication of the wishful thinking by net-zero advocates, in 2014 the current Secretary of State for Energy promised 1 million new green jobs. The outcome is somewhat less impressive. Since then, official government data shows an increase in employment in the low-carbon sector of just 40,000. Against this must be offset the manufacturing jobs we have already lost in other sectors. Moreover, there will surely be many more to come, not least in the steel and oil and gas sectors. We now have the worst of all worlds: high taxes to pay for job losses.

The other great beneficiary of all this wishful thinking is China. It is now the world leader in two seemingly contradictory energy policies: green energy, by securing the global supply and demand lines for lithium-ion batteries, solar panels and wind farm components; and brown energy, by building the equivalent of two coal-powered power stations a week. However, the Chinese famously take much a longer-term view of events than we do. They would agree that, due to recent advances in paleoclimate science, we know that over the last 400 million years the earth’s climate has been changing constantly and often dramatically. Relatively speaking, we are now in one of its cooler periods—the late Cenozoic ice age—meaning that we are at the tail-end of a 50-million-year cooling period.

On our own continent, even very recently we can see climate change in action. In Roman times, it was far warmer than it is now, followed by a brutal cold period in the Dark Ages. Then came the medieval warm period, when vines were growing even in Scotland. That was followed most recently by an especially cold period called the “little ice age”, the coldest period in the last 10,000 years. The statement we heard today that 2023 was the hottest year on record is quite simply not true—far from it.

This long-term view of the earth’s climate changes puts the whole net-zero delusion into a much greater perspective. It suggests that we are taxing and bankrupting ourselves domestically for absolutely minimal global benefit, if any. This whole worldview of climate change should be the subject of another debate, and a very fruitful one it would be too.