I will not follow what the right hon. Member for Rotherham (Mr MacShane) said about the Sergei Magnitsky case, except to say that it would be shocking if the British libel courts are used by the Klyuev organised crime group to try to get at those who are trying to expose the truth and get justice for a person who was murdered.
The person who has not been mentioned much in our debates is a man called William Hone, who is the subject of a great book called “The Laughter of Triumph” by Ben Wilson. William Hone was taken to court for criminal libel on a number of occasions. He was disobliging about Lord Liverpool as Prime Minister, he attacked the Home Secretary, who led for 10 repressive years in government, he was disobliging about someone whom he described as a “fat, lascivious toad”—I will not go into that—and he was rude about the Lord Chief Justice. Juries would not convict William Hone. We are now disposing of juries in virtually all cases of defamation or libel that get heard in the courts. I fear that we may find that advances in law in this area will no longer come from juries and judges, but will be left to the vagaries of the parliamentary timetable, which is a danger. I would therefore like to hear from the Government—perhaps with all-party agreement—that they will return to the issue for legislative scrutiny five years after the Bill becomes an Act.
I believe that the press do not just have the right to be right; I believe they have the right to be wrong. There is the question of what they do when they have got it wrong. Just saying, “Only if you can prove something in advance,” means that we will lose most things.
I end with this bit of advice for those who find that an investigative journalist has written an attack on something for which they are responsible. I was a junior Minister for six years, and whenever I spotted a report by an investigative journalist—including some by Paul Foot—I would ask my Department to find out the answers to various questions that would test whether the accusations had foundation. When I discovered that they had, I would take action. However, in one case when I discovered that the accusations had no foundation, I notified Paul Foot, who told me that it was the first time in the whole of his career as an investigative journalist that someone in authority had come back to him with the information that had been sought and asked whether further inquiries ought to be made. The response to attacks in the press is to find out whether they are justified, not to try to defend oneself whatever the truth.
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