Rape is second only to murder in the catalogues of crime, and it is rightly condemned and rightly severely punished when perpetrators are convicted. But the one thing that this motion neglects is, on the other hand, if rape is so serious a crime, accusing somebody falsely of rape is a very serious matter as well. Everybody knows the stigma that attaches to allegations of that kind. And I do have some difficulty in accepting the terms of the motion where it said

'too often survivors are not believed'.

Well, that may well be true, but also, as we know from the Carl Beech case, and many others, the opposite is also true—that there are many so-called victims who make false allegations and therefore subject the victims to trauma of an unimaginable kind.

So, what worries me about the way in which this motion is couched is that it doesn't seem to pay any regard at all to one of the most fundamental tenets of British justice, which is the presumption of innocence—something that is enshrined within the European Convention on Human Rights, in article 6(2). It seems that to accuse is to convict. We talk about

'international best practice on increasing conviction rates'.

Well, if we assume that we've got to have a quota of convictions, then that seems to undermine the very basis of the justice system itself. It may well be that there are not enough convictions because the evidence doesn't stand up, and, very often, as we know, people get wrongly convicted, and, on the other hand, there are people who get away with crimes because they've not been able to find in court enough evidence to convince a jury.

I'm, I think, the only Member of this Assembly who has had the miserable experience of being falsely accused of rape, along with my wife, back in 2001. I was very publicly arrested before the entire world's media, and a pretty grim experience that is. On the same day, six police officers were sent up to Cheshire, where we were then living, for our house to be raided and searched. And my wife had the appalling experience of having to ring her then 88-year-old mother and asking her to go and open up the house to receive this delegation, because we were actually incarcerated, under arrest, in a police station in London on false charges of sexual abuse. This was all orchestrated, of course, by Max Clifford. He brokered the deal for our false accuser with the News of the World, so that she could pocket £50,000. She ultimately went to prison for three years for perjury and attempting to pervert the course of justice.

I was amazed, 10 years later, when, out of the blue, somebody contacted me to ask if the person who had accused her son falsely of rape was the same person who had accused my wife and me. And lo and behold, so it proved to be: Nadine Milroy-Sloan. She went to prison a second time—for four years on this occasion. And we know from Operation Midland that, very often, the most absurd, it seems—when you read in retrospect what the police had believed—allegations have led to the complete wreckage of people's lives. We know, in the Operation Midland case, people like Field Marshal Lord Bramall were accused of abuse of boys, and the head of MI5, the head of MI6, Prime Minister Edward Heath, the former Home Secretary, Uncle Tom Cobbley and all. And, in the course of tearful interviews with the police, Carl Beech even accused his late stepfather, an army major, of raping him, and said that he had been passed on to generals to be tortured at military bases and sadistically sexually abused by other establishment figures in the 1970s and 1980s. We cannot deny that this is a serious problem as well. So, I wish that this motion had been drawn in a more balanced way to refer to the other victims of this sorry saga as well, which are those who are falsely accused. My old friend Harvey Proctor has been on the television much in recent months as another victim of Operation Midland, and the trauma—I'm sure that anybody who has seen him on television would see—has been etched in the lines on his face.

Now, in drawing attention to people who have suffered this experience, it is not meant in any way to diminish the trauma and injustice that is done to the real victims of rape. Many people are targeted in the circumstances I've described just because they are well known; it is possible to make money out of this if you are sufficiently determined and unscrupulous. But the real victims of false allegations are not so much people like me—in the long term, we've survived and recovered and prospered—the real victims of false allegations are those who have been raped in reality, but whose credibility is reduced in front of a jury by the high-profile false allegations that prove to be absolutely absurd.