Absolutely. I could not improve on my hon. and learned Friend’s words. It is wrong not only because the money might be recycled back into terrorism, but because it devalues the point when we have done something wrong and need to admit liability and learn from it. It turns everything on its head, and that is why we need the change.
I wish to make a slight political point. There have been some brave speeches from certain Opposition Members who know a great deal more about this matter than people sitting on the Front Bench of Her Majesty’s Opposition. It is odd to hear ill-informed remarks about the Bill being directed at those on the Government Front Bench, given that the Government have been open about what they want to achieve, and reasonable and generous in trying to accommodate the amendments from another place. In the spirit of that, it behoves Her Majesty’s Opposition not to use words such as “humiliating” or “climbdown”, but to acknowledge that the Government are listening carefully to, and accommodating, the arguments being made in both Houses. I hope that, at the end of the Committee stage, the Government will come back to the House with a Bill that will provide justice to the individual officers, to the intelligence agencies, to the nation and to the litigants. I hope that the Bill will do something that we in this place are supposed to do—namely, to ensure that the dispensation of justice is indeed just.
6.5 pm