While I was deputy and then president of English PEN, we were running the 2005 Free Expression is No Offence campaign, calling for an amendment to the then Labour government’s proposed criminal offence of incitement to religious hatred. Anthony Lester taught us everything we did not know about how to contend with the passage of legislation through the parliamentary system.
He was a walking encyclopedia about competing freedoms and formulating law. Our amendment was enacted. Anthony was a great, generous and public-spirited man whose work against discrimination in the UK is unequalled.
