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.