There is no doubt that the more recent you are, the more salient the case. Frankly, I can remember being ashamed of a British Prime Minister hosting Putin at the Olympics only a few years after Litvinenko was murdered in our country in the most cruel and overt act of state terrorism. Neither Government dealt with that. Cameron’s action was grotesque in the extreme, but neither Government dealt with it. Similarly, both Governments kowtowed to China after Tibet and all the rest of it. That has been done too many times. It is the entire system, not just one Government or another.
London is a fabulously attractive place for the Russians or the Chinese. If you want to be somewhere else than Russia, this is the place to be. We have facilitated that at every turn. Here comes the issue to which SLAPPs relate. We have a legal system that is probably the most brilliant in the world in delivering fair outcomes and good justice, but it is also phenomenally expensive, which means it is one-sided in its operation between an oligarch and an ordinary citizen, journalist or whoever they may be.
In conjunction with that are the things that flow from it, such as the behaviour of solicitors, to some of whom my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely), who is not in his place, gave a fair old pasting yesterday, but one that was deserved. The private investigators industry, unregulated, undertakes crimes to gather information for use as weapons against other people. Our courts—not uniquely, but outstandingly—allow that information to be used. In each individual case that might be the right decision, but the collective effect of that is to suck criminally based information into our system and therefore engender and help the industry.
All that is why new clause 1 and 2 are vital. That all had the effect of creating a vast, possibly unintentional institutional cover-up for criminal activity: money laundering, fraud and concealment of evil actions abroad. Let us bear in mind that some of the oligarchs we are talking about are murderers. The system murders people. It is evil activity. That is why new clauses 1 and 2 are incredibly important.
What the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill is proposing in new clauses 1 and 2 is a second best option. We already heard the best option in earlier interventions: a freestanding Bill immediately, because this is happening now. There are court cases going on as I stand here in which people are having their lives destroyed by SLAPPs. The next best is to have it in the Bill of Rights, but we know that that is way down the timetable, for all sorts of reasons. We may not see it before the next election, in which case we will have lost two more years.
The new clauses amount to a way of dealing with this criminal—or near criminal—activity in a way that is not susceptible to a finely turned piece of law. I listened with fascination to my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for South Swindon (Sir Robert Buckland) on that point. Getting that right is difficult; getting this right is not, because the greatest enemy of evil is a free press. In our country in the last couple of decades we have allowed our free press to become gagged and crippled. If we can take that gag away and remove those bonds, we will suddenly expose all the things that we need to deal with. We will see the weaknesses I talked about—the SFO and the NCA—and put them right, one by one. That is why we should support new clauses 1 and 2. I talked before about the weaknesses of the SFO and the NCA. We will see those weaknesses and we will put them right, one by one. That is why we should support this measure today.