I thank the hon. Member for Eltham (Clive Efford) for his speech; I agree with many of his points. Normally, when people agree on stuff across the House, a bit of virtue signalling may be going on—but in this case, agreement shows serious concern about a really serious issue. I thank both the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Liam Byrne) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) for securing this debate; for many of us, it will be one of the most important that we have spoken in.
The abuse of UK courts by organised crime, oligarchs and authoritarian states and their wretched proxies is, I believe, a significant threat when it comes to the corruption
of the UK legal system, to freedom of speech and, as the hon. Member for Eltham was saying, to the conduct of due diligence against potentially corrupt actors who would threaten the health of our institutions.
I agree wholeheartedly with what my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill) was saying—that nobody here is questioning the independence of UK courts and nobody is saying that we do not want that independence to continue. It is also true that London is a very important financial and legal centre, and long may that continue—it brings a great deal of money, wealth and employment into London and the UK—but I hope the Minister will understand that bad money drives out good and bad law will do the same. If we allow the cancer of the selling of intimidation services by high-end legal firms, it will not do us any good in the long run, just as in the long run letting mafias launder money would also be bad for us.
Let me be clear. Although these tactics are sold by law firms to many different actors, including organised crime and corrupt corporations, I think they are very much part, as some Members have said, of the Russian state playbook and Russian hybrid war tactics: the tools of non-military conflict in the west against the west. I will argue for significant reform of this corrupting cottage industry, which enriches the few at the expense of the whole. We need to bring in anti-SLAPP legislation, and we need to go after those lawyers—dare I call them slappers—who use such tactics. We need anti-slapper legislation. We also need a much more robust public Act of defence. The United States has one and we have to bring one in here as well.
Finally, I will make the case that we need a foreign lobbying law—or foreign agent registration Act, as some call it. In that way, the law firms that sell services such as reputation management, and related industries such as commercial spying and dirt digging on people, have to be clear about their business models. When they sell those services to overseas entities such as the major and questionable corporations that are Mr Putin’s proxies, they need to give us that information and put it in the public domain, so that the foreign lobbying law can help us identify who works for foreign actors and what they are doing.
We have discussed the various definitions of lawfare so I will not go into that, but there appear to be two important elements that I would like to address specifically. The first is when the law is used to intimidate, wear down and financially destroy journalists and campaigners, and the second, as the hon. Member for Eltham said, is when the law is used to intimidate organisations into failing to conduct due diligence. There is a massive potential issue if we allow bad actors into our energy, food or telecommunications markets.
From 1990 to 1994, I lived in the Soviet Union and in post-Soviet states, and in my academic work have studied as hard as I can types of Russian hybrid war. Let me give a little bit of background. In Russia, the ultimate outcome for a journalist who crosses the rich and powerful and cannot be silenced is death. They are murdered—and nearly two dozen have been murdered under Mr Putin’s leadership of the country. In this country, the murder of UK officials and journalists is not yet part of the oligarch organised crime playbook, although it is in some EU countries, so it is a danger. Instead, other methods are used, two of which are, as we have heard today, the use
of libel law and the use of data protection law to intimidate and destroy financially. Reporters, campaigners and activists in our state are threatened not with physical destruction but with financial destruction.
The kompromat corruption industry has sadly been exported to our country from Moscow and St Petersburg. As well as journalists, publishers are intimidated into silence. I congratulate massively HarperCollins for fighting its cases. If HarperCollins has to pay out £5 million or £2 million in court costs every time, the message is clear: do not write about Russia, about those close to the Russian leader or about those state oligarchs who hide their dodgy dealings in plain sight. For the UK and the wider world, the result is that, as many of us have said, freedom of speech has been stifled and journalistic investigations remain unlaunched.