Biography

[on airport security] If you are in my business, and I have people touching my private parts all day long, all I have to say is, 'That's what you have to do to keep us safe'.

People forget that members of Parliament are legislators. They're not comedians. They're there to vote on stuff. But the Prime Minister's capacity to dictate House business, put together omnibus bills and ram them through, while imposing discipline, has concentrated executive power at the expense of the legislature.

An enemy is a rival who has to be destroyed. An adversary is an opponent you want to defeat, but who you may later need as an ally. But if the House votes are along straight party lines and you have a majority, you have no incentive to treat your adversaries as anything but enemies.

What I fear is what I think we've got: a hollowed-out democracy in which solitary politicians hurl abuse at each other in an empty chamber, and power accrues ever more steadily to the Prime Minister, to the Supreme Court, to the bureaucracy and to the press. And all of them regard those elected to represent the people with contempt and derision.

The two states with the biggest strategic capacity to do harm to freedom in the world are Russia and China. Both are something new in the annals of political science: single party tyrannies busy perfecting crony capitalism, regimes built on corruption and privilege, where only growth keeps discontent at bay and where a middle class with precarious economic freedom chafes under restrictions to its civil and political rights.