Africa

Few Members can match the eloquence displayed by the hon. Member for Macclesfield (Sir Nicholas Winterton) in his speech. We are aware of the issues to do with Zimbabwe, and the hon. Gentleman has spoken about them with great courage. Depressingly however, while he was making his speech I was looking at the Economist Intelligence Unit league table of democratic countries in the world—which uses a sophisticated methodology—and I have counted that 10 countries in Africa are even less democratic than Zimbabwe. If we have only one debate every 15 years, the hon. Gentleman will be 100 before he has addressed all the other countries. I hope that there will be considerable progress before that happens, however.