Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for your patience and generosity. I had to sprint across to St Thomas’s, where my wife is having a scan. We are expecting our third child.
The supporters of the Bill would have the country believe that those who are opposed to it are opponents of democracy itself. Today I stand to refute that ugly caricature. No one in the House is more committed to British democracy than I. My family immigrated to Britain from an Iraq where democracy was spoken of only behind closed doors, late at night, among trusted friends. Compared to the brutal realities of Saddam’s rule, democracy was an abstract dream. Yet here in Britain there was a constitutional order which made democracy real, concrete, embedded in the very fabric of our national life.
Here was a judiciary—unelected, I grant you—which interpreted the law in the interests of the public, not of the ruling party. Here was a Queen—again, unelected—whose impregnable position as Head of State made sure that no politician could ever wield supreme power. And here also was the oldest and greatest of Parliaments, an elected House of Commons to embody the will of the people, and an appointed House of Lords to stand as a check against the tyranny of the majority.