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Royal Marriages and Succession to the Crown (Prevention of Discrimination) Bill

Indeed, or earlier. The hon. Gentleman will recollect that, because on one occasion he got there before me and on another I got there before him. In 1979, I found someone else in that room when I went to try to introduce my Bill on police authorities' powers, which would have introduced measures partially to democratise police authorities that I was able to introduce in 1997. Having failed on one occasion, I arrived to find no one else in that wretched room and settled down for four hours, glued to the room, in order to get my ten-minute Bill slot. The room was full of copies of Hansard from 1861, so, faute de mieux, I started reading them. They were absolutely extraordinary. I opened that copy of Hansard on a page that contained debates about suppression and coercion in Ireland. One Member had the temerity to complain about the fact that whole villages were being torched in order to punish all the villagers for the fact that one of their number—and no more—might possibly have committed a crime against the state. What was so breathtaking was the fact that Front Benchers on both sides of the House were saying "That is absolutely right. Of course these villages should be torched. These people do not properly recognise who is in charge. They are potentially treacherous, traitors to the nation. What else can we do but suppress and coerce the Irish peasantry?" As must be clear to the House, I have never forgotten that. One of the things we must remember is that what we are dealing with is a rich, highly complicated and highly divisive history: the history of our nation. It has been said that a nation without a history is like a man without a memory. We cannot escape from our history: it is part of us—or, as T. S. Eliot more intriguingly put it in the last of the "Four Quartets",""A people without history""Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern""Of timeless moments."" What we are discussing today—this is for the benefit of those who take an interest, as I think all of us in the House do, in how we come to be here, and what has moulded this extraordinary and great nation of the United Kingdom—is the consequences of two centuries, the 16th and especially the 17th, of great conflict, in which much blood was shed. We had a civil war in which one in 10 males in England is estimated to have been killed, and in which families were divided. Even that did not lead to any kind of settlement until almost exactly 40 years after Charles I lost his head—an event that my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, Acton and Shepherd's Bush (Mr. Slaughter) described as one of the greatest moments in history, involving a man whom my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, North described as the martyred king.