Member

With the passing of this Bill—it will indeed pass in a moment—there also pass eight centuries of English history and centuries of the history of all parts of our kingdom. It is right to refer to that, because in those centuries much that was good and great—and, in the widest sense, noble—was accomplished, from the curtailing of the absolute power of the monarchy in medieval times and through the Glorious Revolution to modem initiatives such as that of my noble friend Lord Arran’s father in the first freeing of gay people from the shameful, odious penal laws in 1967.