I shall offer some thoughts as a practising scientist who on one occasion only was confronted with a legal letter of, essentially, a threatening kind because I had accurately described something as a bunch of garbage. I promptly folded. I did not have the courage of Simon Singh or the principle that lead the journal Nature to spend £1.5 million on a ludicrous suit. We have a very tricky thing to try to solve. We are internationally known. The Americans have passed legislation to cut themselves loose from us. The United Nations has formally criticised what we have been doing. We are known as the place where you come if somebody living in Iceland has irritated you in Australia because of the extravagant and extraordinary costs, which have no analogue anywhere in the world, of dealing with these issues.
My father was a lawyer, and I have every sympathy and understanding that we are wrestling with a very difficult problem. One or two words will not capture it, but the spirit is sensible enough. Part of the problem is the legal costs, and they are something that we are clearly not going to legislate about. As we look at this, we should not look at this through a purely legalistic prism. We should try to see a way forward to have sensible legislation that means that if you criticise on valid scientific grounds the chimerical claims of someone—I shall not name an example—you will not be confronted with the dilemma of principle that people are being confronted with now. This is what has brought this. I see the problem, but the issues raised by the legalistic arguments that are not sensitive to the underlying facts are substantial and difficult to solve but need to be confronted. Do not just explain to us what we all understand. Of course there has to be some careful examination of it by competent people, but that is not necessarily served by the way we use expert witnesses in these legalistic things.