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Terrorism Bill

I decided to pay closer attention to the Bill than I have done so far, particularly to Clause 2, when I inadvertently sat in on the discussions held on Monday afternoon and heard what was being said about librarians and booksellers. I should declare an interest as a rather part-time book dealer in mainly political material. When I go home this weekend, I had better look through my stock to see whether anything might fall foul of the Bill. I believe that there is a serious problem here for bookshops and booksellers unless we get it right. To that end, I was very interested in what the noble Lord, Lord Ahmed, had to say on the subject when he spoke on Monday. Like other noble Lords, I am encouraged by what the Minister has said about her proposals to make changes to the Bill and I have read carefully the proceedings for Monday in Hansard. I do not want to repeat the fundamental point about the need for book dealers and booksellers to be offered reasonable protection from inadvertently being caught by this legislation. However, I shall make a few points that the Government may want to look at in the light of their new proposals to be brought forward on Report. These points indicate what I shall be looking for in deciding whether their proposals meet what I consider to be reasonable. A lot of people who buy and sell books and other printed material are not the big booksellers. The bookselling chains are the main players in the market and I expect that they have a pretty good idea of what they are selling. They employ people to read their books and so forth. Local bookshops operate ordering services, usually very efficient ones. I can ring the bookshop in Colne, give the title I want and by the next morning, the shop will have it for me. That is a brilliant service, but I do not expect the staff to know what is in the book I am buying. Therefore the whole question of intent and not being implicated if you do not actually support what you are selling is very important. For the second-hand book trade, in which I am involved, it is even more important because you get large quantities of material; you get cartons and boxes full of stuff. In many cases, a second-hand book shop will put such material in a storeroom and it might be there for several years before it is sorted out, put on shelves, thrown away, given to Oxfam or whatever. That is the way in which the second-hand book trade works. It is not a high-powered organisation. Very often it is people operating out of their own attics or small shops, and to expect them to know and understand exactly what they are selling is not reasonable. So there is the question of stock but, in many cases, you cannot define it by the customers you are going to get because you have no idea who they will be for this material in the future. You just hope that one day you might find some. The second point I want to make relates to the question of customers. It is impossible to know all the people you are selling things to. From time to time I sell some fairly nasty stuff. Some of it is from the far left, some of it is from the far right—it is a small proportion of what I sell—and I have quite a lot of fascist material. I go out of my way to be careful about who I am selling it to. For example, the last time I sold a copy of Mein Kampf it was to a prominent Jewish member of the Liberal Democrats. I was fairly sure he would not be corrupted by what he would read. It is impossible to know all your customers. Even with people you have known for several years, who may specialise in collecting this material, you do not know what, underneath it all, their motivation might be. You try to filter out people you have suspicions about but it is very important that booksellers in this position should not have to vouch for the bona fides of all their customers and the effect such material might have on them. My third point concerns the definition of ““booksellers””. On Monday, the Minister said:"““it will be a defence for a person charged with the offence to show that the publication did not express his views and that it was clear it did not””," and,"““that the person did not provide the material with the intention of it being of use to terrorists””." That sounds very reassuring. I have listened to some of the legal arguments on Monday and today but I do not understand them all. There are some very eminent lawyers in the Committee and I shall have to leave those arguments to them. But when the Minister went on to say,"““There can be no question but that that defence should be available to all legitimate librarians, academics and booksellers””," I began to wonder what the word ““legitimate”” means in this sense. All sorts of people operate in the second-hand book trade—some on a very small scale, some on a medium scale and some on a big scale—so how do you become a ““legitimate”” book dealer? Certainly many people who deal nowadays—especially with eBay and so on—are not registered or members of associations. The Minister continued—this is what worries me most—that,"““The defence would be restricted to them””—" that is, librarians, academics and booksellers—"““It would not be extended to others seeking to flout the law and encourage or facilitate terrorism””.—[Official Report, 5/12/05; col. 465.]" That is fine—I have no wish to extend it to such people—but what about all the people in between? Quite a lot of people do not come under the categories of academics, librarians and booksellers. A great deal of material consists of pamphlets, leaflets and posters—material that people in the trade describe as ““ephemera””—which is bought and sold by many people. Some are booksellers and some trade in such material specifically and I am concerned that the defence may be restricted only to booksellers. Perhaps the Minister will look at that point. As I have said, because of the way in which material is bought—in job lots, through house clearances and so on—you have no idea what you are buying. Substantial amounts of material are bought at auction. You will go there, you will see three or four boxes full of stuff, containing two or three things that you want, and you will bid for that material. But goodness knows what is underneath it all. You might end up, quite inadvertently, as the owner of some pretty nasty stuff. All these matters need to be taken into consideration if the concerns that are beginning to be felt by booksellers, and by second-hand book dealers in particular, are to be alleviated. I look forward to studying carefully the wording of the Minister’s amendments on Report and to an assurance that these people, who are all engaging in perfectly legitimate trade, will not be inadvertently caught by a Bill which is nothing to do with them whatever.