My Lords, I shall talk briefly to Amendment 2B and, in so doing, I echo what has been said about my noble friend Lord McNally. I do not know about McNally’s Bill but I certainly knew a Bill McNally, who was one of the finest poachers in Suffolk.
I am not happy with Amendment 2C, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter of Kentish Town, but I have a lot of time for her Amendment 2D, supported by the noble Lord, Lord May of Oxford. As was said by my noble friend, there seems to be considerable anxiety around the bullying of corporations, which seems to get worse as time goes by. Some of the largest and wickedest of them are some of the most brutal in the way that they will abuse the law to silence critics.
I want to raise with my noble friend Lord McNally a point on Amendment 2B because this is potentially a Pepper v Hart occasion, where he could say in the most trenchant terms that my concern is misplaced. The amendment enlarges on Clause 1 of the Bill, headed “Serious harm”. It says:
“For the purposes of this section, harm to the reputation of a body that trades for profit”.
I am not absolutely clear that the phrase,
“a body that trades for profit”,
is beyond ambiguity. I am thinking particularly of charities, some of which trade for profit in the mainstream of the work that they do—for example, some schools, some hospitals and gymnasia. There are many areas where charities carry on a trade, but it is a charitable trade and it is, in one obvious and simple sense, for profit because it generates the wherewithal enabling them to run their hospital or whatever it is. I could have chosen language, I think, that would put the meaning beyond doubt, but we have to live with the wording that is here. As I understand it, there is no further opportunity to change the phrasing of this part of Amendment 2B. So I hope that my noble friend Lord McNally will assure me that this wording is specifically designed to exclude from its ambit the work of charities. Otherwise, I think we have a very large problem with this amendment.