At a January 11 international conference in Paris, John Bercow, former Speaker of the UK Parliament, delivered a powerful address spotlighting the Iranian regime’s deepening vulnerabilities and urging strong global support for the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI).

Bercow pointed to the regime’s deteriorating economy, nationwide protests, and widely rejected sham elections as evidence of its instability. He described the regime as “genocidal, belligerent, and egregious,” asserting that it relies on chaos and repression to maintain control.

Dispelling claims that no alternative exists, Bercow commended the NCRI and its leader, Mrs. Maryam Rajavi, for presenting a “democratic and morally superior” vision for Iran. He outlined the NCRI’s comprehensive plan, including an interim government to oversee free elections and the drafting of a new constitution.

Bercow denounced Western appeasement policies and emphasized the importance of international pressure, including sanctions and formal recognition of the NCRI as a viable democratic alternative for Iran.

The full transcript of John Bercow’s speech follows below:

Mrs. Rajavi, prime ministers, generals, parliamentarians, Ashraf 3, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for welcoming me and giving me the opportunity to be amongst your number today, which I regard again as an undiluted privilege.

And I should like at the outset to say what I have previously said to Mrs. Rajavi and also to my good friend Fazin Hashemi who was in touch with me the other day. There are two things that are most striking about your events. One is that they are always without fail invariably organized with meticulous attention to detail and operate with clockwork efficiency.

And the second characteristic of your events which I think will probably strike some of our European and our American friends, but certainly always strikes me in the British context having attended several of them, is this, as you Americans would say, when it comes to support for the NCRI we have a tradition of operating across the aisle.

That is to say, whatever else divides people in the United Kingdom polity, there are people of rights and left and center alike who regard as their pleasure and responsibility, Mrs. Rajavi, without hesitation or flinching to support you because you are the embodiment of vision, courage, sacrifice, and leadership.

As has been poignantly observed by earlier speakers, by General Jones, and by Prime Minister Truss, the regime is, I think, indubitably at the weakest point that we have known, and that weakness is pithily described and characterized.

It is manifested in the form of what must be the weakest economic situation that any of us can recall marked by hyperinflation, appalling living standards, terrible want of a kind that we in our country don’t know, and a scarcity of the most basic essentials, which frankly causes most of us to shed tears on reflection on it.

Appalling economic disadvantage which is systemic and I think irrevocable. That is, of course, accompanied by what in one sense is the most encouraging phenomenon which is those uprisings of two0twotwo.

People standing up in their own communities individually and together saying up with this as Churchill would have said, we will not put, and alongside that, if you want a further expression a manifestation of public discontent, you see it in the form of those boycotts of the two sham, and I repeat the two sham, utterly sham elections.

One of the things about these misogynistic mullahs is that they seem to think that they’re so clever that everybody else is stupid, but people are not stupid. You’re not stupid. You can see perfectly well for yourselves that those elections were in no sense representations of public opinion, not for one moment and that’s why millions of people decided to reject and refused to take no part in them because they were utterly corrupt and fixed.

In recent times also alongside all the cruel and unjust, utterly unjust deaths, there was one death, the death of Ebrahim Raisi which offered both simultaneously a body blow to the regime and a source of great sucker to those who believe in life, liberty, justice, the rule of law, democracy, pluralism, and the chance to live a life of the pursuit of happiness. Do not underestimate the blow that that represented to Khamenei. That that stalwart supplicant of his is no longer.

And then as, prime minister Truss very properly and legitimately pointed out, Hezbollah has sustained massive collateral damage, and the people who are frit, as Margaret Thatcher would have said, frit. It’s an old-fashioned, ladies and gentlemen, Lincolnshire term meaning frightened.

Frit by what has happened to Hezbollah is the misogynist Mullahs in Tehran because they drew huge support from Hezbollah, that terroristic and tyrannical agent of their political desires and goals.

And then when you see alongside all of that perhaps the most significant event of all namely the fall of the Assad regime, you realize that there is a chance, there is a possibility, there is a prospect, there is an imaginable destination of freedom on the march, freedom being triumphant, freedom prevailing.

But as has been referenced with some world-weary cynicism about which I, for one, make no complaint, they have for all too long and they still are now.

People fundamentally of goodwill who nevertheless do not understand the dictators, the totalitarians, the megalomaniacs to tell the totalitarian mindset, and who delude themselves that one more push by gentle diplomatic means, one more nice conversation in the margins, one more nice effort on the telephone or by Zoom in diplomatic parlance will suffice to get thoroughly unreasonable people to be reasonable. These whether they know it or not are the counselors of despair ladies and gentlemen.

In fact, of course, as we know and have been articulated in other terms, appeasement just doesn’t work. Being nice to dictators is regarded not as the exertion of influence, but as the demonstration of weakness.

It is simply a sign of weakness. I hope I can be forgiven for repeating today what I had the pleasure of saying on a previous occasion from our own United Kingdom experience.

At the time of the wartime government in 1939 and up until early May 1940, that government practiced and preached the philosophy of appeasement, and it was the late and great Winston Churchill who said of that government that he observed them on the treasury bench, the government front bench, and that they appeared to be resolved only to be irresolute. Adamant for drift. All powerful to be impotent and that needed to be decisively changed, and it was.

And yet there are still people who say in the Iranian context there is no alternative, and I think what those of us here to support you in our different ways with our different words but with a similar message are here to assert today is that this is the alternative the existence Over a four and a half decade long established resistance force, characterized by its commitment to democracy, to pluralism, to justice, to the rule of law, to environmental propriety, to equality for women, for a secular state, for the abolition of the death penalty, and indeed for a changed constitution and a non-nuclear state.

So that is the alternative. It is a democratic alternative.

What’s more, by virtue of its track record of selfless and sacrificial resistance, it is hugely experienced, hugely learned, hugely well organized, and the mech resistance units, 1,000 upon 1,000 upon 1,000 of them across the country have as their most stellar quality.

This has been impressed upon me time and time again over the years by the resistance movement.

The fact that they are not imposed upon, they are not threats to, they spring out of, they come from, they are interwoven with the Iranian society because they are part of the country, and if the regime dares to remove one another will replace him or her within minutes or hours or days.

So those Resistance Units speak to and are representative of the democratic strength of the mass of the Iranian people.

And because Mrs. Rajavi is too gracious, modest, and self-effacing to say it herself, I think we need to say it for her. How dramatically apposite and telling it is that the National Council of Resistance of Iran is represented by the most eloquent symbol of gender equality, of belief in freedom, of the pursuit of justice, of somebody who has spent decades of her life making the most enormous sacrifices, because I think Mrs. Rajavi you understand that the achievement of power is not an end in itself, but a means to the realization of the hopes, the dreams, the expectations of the people whom you are here to serve.

Isn’t that my friends a lesson that the regime ought to take to heart? They’re there to serve themselves. You madam Rajavi and the NCRI are in business to serve your people. That is the difference.

So, I think my friends, General Jones and Prime Minister Truss disposed of the notion that there is no alternative because this is the alternative. And what’s more, as evidence that none of you can ever be accused of sitting satisfied with what you’ve got, you have since our last meeting, thanks Mrs. Rajavi for your presentation in the European Parliament and your appearance in Washington as well, you have added a new spoke to the wheel and that is a specific itemized timed game plan from where we are to where we need to be.

I echo, very explicitly echo, what has already been said about the importance of the exertion of external pressure in the form of robust sanctions, of course, but we know that you’re not looking for outside assistance. This is not an Iraq or Afghanistan or a Kosovo or Sierra Leone. It’s not like that.

What you’re looking for is our acceptance, the international community’s acceptance, a global acceptance that there is an alternative that you yourselves are that democratic alternative, and that there is a route map, and that route map is about the establishment of an interim government.

So the naysayers, the negativists, the doom-mongers who say nothing could be done because it will be chaos are just wrong. The source of the chaos is the existing genocidal, belligerent, bestial, egregious, execrable, how many more adjectives do I need, regime.

And the antidote to that is to have an interim government which is initially there for a period of six months, and which then creates the basis for and segues seamlessly into an election process.

Not a sham election process, but a handing of power to the people for the creation of a democratically elected legislature that reflects the free and express will of the Iranian people.

And that legislature is, if you will, the reflection of the election, step two. And step three is that period of two years of government which crafts a new constitution to be put to the people of Iran.

So never ever from this day on let it be said that there isn’t an alternative. The alternative by the way to killing people on mass is to stop killing people on mass. The alternative to dictatorship is to establish democracy, and having got a democracy people can choose by whom and in what way they are to be governed.

That’s the way forward. Mrs. Rajavi for showing the people of Iran a way forward, for building their support, and for sticking at it through thick and thin. You do a signal service to your people, and I hope it will also be agreed by our friends, and they are our friends. Unquestionably our friends in Ukraine. Fighting back despite the Russian yoke, despite the bestiality of that regime, the Ukrainian people know that they have rights on their side, and they have the best of the international community on their side as well.

So, we stand together we stand together, we stand in opposition to dictatorship be it of the autocratic age of the shah or of today’s mullahs, and we stand for something different, something qualitatively better, something obviously, demonstrably, unanswerably, morally superior, and it’s called democracy, freedom, human rights, and the rule of law.