Back in November I wrote about a British Government consultation aimed at preventing criminals profiting from their crimes through publication earnings. The deadline for responses to the Home Office is 9 February. At Macmillan we have taken this potential threat to freedom of expression seriously not least because we have been threatened on several occasions including around the publication of Cries Unheard by Gitta Sereny, the story of Mary Bell.

There was also quite a ruckus over the publication of Jeffrey Archer's Prison Diaries.

As a result we commissioned a Macmillan employee, Tim Howles, to discuss the issue with editors and lawyers internally and externally and generate a response. Here is the opening part of it - the full document will presumably be uploaded to the Home Office website in due course.

In principle, do you think that a new measure is necessary? Please say why or why not?

Response:

The response of the Macmillan Publishing Group to this consultation paper is as follows:

                     i.      The Macmillan Publishing Group supports in principle the need to avoid causing undue offence to victims and to the families of victims of serious crime due to the publication of writing by the convicted offender that refers directly to the crime;
 

                   ii.      However, the public interest is ultimately served most by safeguarding the freedom of expression and by protecting the right to receive information about serious crime;

                  iii.      For this reason, the first concern of the Macmillan Publishing Group is that no proposal would prevent the publication of such writings. This includes any mechanism that would tend towards either direct prohibition (such as the introduction of criminal or civil liability for the publisher) or indirect action (such as making the writing of relevant material less attractive to criminals or too expensive for the publisher to contemplate);

                  iv.      The Macmillan Publishing Group believes that proposal options (1), (2) and (3), as set out in the consultation paper, are unacceptable, since they would all in practice equate to a prevention of the publication of such writings;

                    v.      The Macmillan Publishing Group strongly asserts that no new measure is necessary. This is on the grounds of cost (these options would be expensive and time-consuming to implement), efficiency (they would be hard to define and implement) and public interest (the market should be the ultimate arbitrator of what is acceptable);

                  vi.      Therefore, the Macmillan Publishing Group strongly believes that proposal option (4) should be pursued in order to allow market forces to determine whether or not the publication is read.

I cannot believe that the Government would be silly enough to try to enforce unenforceable and constrictive legislation in this area. The problem is that Governments sometimes do silly things in response to tabloid headlines. The book trade should help the Government not to be silly on this occasion.

As part of my 'academic' duties I sit on the board of a partnership between the London Business School and the University of the Arts London. It is called the Centre for Creative Business and its aim is to help organisations which focus on the development of creativity also to cope with the demands of business. They run an excellent and heavily subsidised course, Building the Creative Business, and you can download a prospectus here.