I am wholly in favour of these two amendments. I want to raise one question that probably illustrates one of my many areas of ignorance. I worry a little bit that saying a statement is not defamatory unless it has caused substantial financial loss will run up against classic examples of where a large organisation, like a corporation, has used costs to silence someone, but there are many examples of where people have persisted in their criticism. If anyone who is interested in these case horror stories e-mails me, I can send them a list of a dozen different illustrative stories. Despite costs of £500,000 or £1.5 million, and the loss of time to the person involved, the better cases, such as those involving an unsafe medical device or people in South Africa being told that they should buy a particular person’s vitamin pills and that AIDS medicines are ineffective, have been effective and have inflicted serious loss on companies that should have been put out of business.
That brings us back to our very first issue. In most of these cases, a good judge, with two or three experts, could have settled the matter in half an hour. Whether AIDS drugs or vitamin pills are effective is beyond dispute; yet it took 17 months and £500,000 to settle it. I suspect that I am, in some sense, out of order by raising this, but there is a slight overtone that causing substantial damage gives you a reason to start suing someone. I think that we need to go right back to our first discussion about having to ask whether the damage was based on an accurate description of untruths or unknowing or knowing faults and lies in what was being marketed.