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Business of the House

I am delighted to hear that we finally have a date for the Identity Cards Bill. We look forward to what will no doubt be a vigorous debate. Will the Leader of the House give us, as a matter of urgency, an opportunity to discuss the Home Secretary's decision to ban protests from a wide area around the Palace of Westminster? The Government have already tried to introduce house arrest without trial; now they want to ban political protests around the mother of Parliaments. Does the right hon. Gentleman not accept that such actions make it more difficult for this country to stand on the moral high ground when criticising repressive regimes such as those in Burma and Zimbabwe? Talking of Zimbabwe, last week the right hon. Gentleman brushed off my request for a statement on the situation there. He will have read in today's papers that circumstances in Zimbabwe continue to go from bad to worse. Why is it not possible for a Foreign Office Minister to come to the House and tell us what the Government are doing to help to forge an international response to the problems? May we have an early debate on the suspension of the regulations introduced in the House two years ago to implement the food supplements directive? The right hon. Gentleman will know that the European Court of Justice has made a provisional decision that the directive cannot stand, but the regulations will still come into force on 1 August. Will the right hon. Gentleman give us an opportunity to suspend them, so that organisations no longer have to work with them although they may be set aside shortly? That would remove the black cloud that currently hangs over the industry. Did the Leader of the House have an opportunity to drop in to the "race against time" lobby on Duchenne muscular dystrophy earlier this week? As he will know, this is a terrible disease which threatens the lives of many children in my constituency and, I suspect, in his. Will he make time for a debate so that we can discuss the research programme that is trying to sort out the problem and deliver a real solution for those children, so that we can discuss ways of helping to give them a better future? Finally, may we have a debate on local dialects so that the House can congratulate the Leader of the House on his success in entering the dictionary of cockney rhyming slang? The website cockneyrhymingslang.co.uk gives the example: "You're a right Geoff Hoon you are." It appears under the eye-catching heading "What on earth does 'Geoff Hoon' mean?"