Excerpts of speech of John Bercow, Speaker of the House of Commons of the United Kingdom (2009 – 2019), at the Free Iran 2022, is as follows:
Hello, friends and colleagues. It’s John Bercow here, former speaker of the UK House of Commons. I’m delighted to join you. And I do you say to express support, explicit, unflinching and robust support for the National Council of Resistance of Iran, support for the MEK Resistance Units and support for Maryam Rajavi.
What do I mean by support? What I mean is unqualified backing for freedom, for democracy, for secularism and for a republic in Iran based upon the principles of peace, justice, the rule of law and crucially, regular, democratic, free and fair elections. That is the essence of the democratic settlement that I seek, and I believe you seek for Iran. Accompanying that. It follows, that we should be united, as I believe we are, in opposition to all kinds and forms of dictatorship.
Be that dictatorship of the Shah or tyrannical theocrats. Opposition to appeasement of the best deal Iranian regime, and I may say opposition to the Belgian treaty. An issue that has reared its ugly head of mate and is a source of real concern to you and me alike. Whatever the intention of the Belgian signatories to that treaty, the effect threatens to be a green light to terrorists and thereby a mortal threat to human life. You cannot compromise with and seek to accommodate the preferences of dictators. It doesn’t work.
They don’t respect it. They just demand more. It is disappointing when democratic governments don’t realize that. The time has come for the United Kingdom, European Union and the United States to step up and to speak up for a politics and my friends a polity, that is to say, a constitutional arrangement or system in Iran which stops repressing people and starts respecting them instead. I’m in no doubt as to the volatile state that exists in Iran at present.
Economic crisis, natural disasters, flight of capital, business collapse, widespread poverty, growing starvation all tell a story of a regime that is failing, abjectly and which has become now entirely disfunctional. Those are strong words, but they are words chosen advisory. The dictators thought that putting the genocidal thug Ebraham Raisi in, would stabilize matters, would keep the population under control, would arrogate power to the center and secure its base. What they didn’t reckon with is the opposition of the population. Raisi has spawned mass protests, protests every week, new resistance units as we speak.
And this event supported as never before. We’re not talking about 1000 Resistance Units and video clips into your conference. We’re talking about tens of thousands. As people in growing numbers express their virulent, heartfelt and unrelenting opposition to the regime and their desire for a proper democracy. The flame of freedom continues to burn formidably in Iran, and that won’t change.
And since last I spoke to you in July of last year and indeed in January of this year, we’ve seen further evidence of the uprising, the democratic renaissance against the regime, the torching of the statue of Soleimani posters of Khamenei and Raisi, your supporters of penetrating state radio and television, we saw examples of that earlier this year.
And seizing control of thousands and thousands and thousands of surveillance cameras, which really must be spooking and worrying, this tyrannical state. They’ve got to understand that you won’t go away, and your supporters won’t go away. The torturers have been exposed. They are being exposed, and they will go on being exposed by your magnificent work.
You are the most formidable campaigners for democratic change that I’ve encountered in 35 years. Engagement in public life. And your supporters elsewhere in the world, in Britain, in Europe, in the United States, those of us with democratic pedigree, your supporters won’t stop either. So I say to you, keep going. And remember, in the words of Queen Victoria, the possibility of defeat does not arise.
Or as Churchill put it in Adversity, remember K-B-O keep buggering on at all times. The tyrants will be vanquished. And those of you who want the alternative, namely a democratic, secular, peace-loving, freedom orientated, rule of law driven state, will prevail. The sooner the folks in power get that message, so much the better. Good luck.
Keep going. I’m with you in your pursuit of freedom. Onwards. Goodbye.
