Danny Kruger

It is a pleasure to serve under you, Ms Butler, and to be in a Chamber with so many of my favourite colleagues. I look around and am genuinely so inspired, pleased and gratified to be among this group of parliamentarians of all parties. I do not know what it is that binds us together. Well, I do—we are mostly believers. I pay tribute to everybody here, particularly to the hon. Member for North Northumberland (David Smith); I welcome him to and congratulate him on his very significant appointment. Congratulations too to the hon. Member for Newport West and Islwyn (Ruth Jones), on her championing of this agenda over many years and on calling this debate. I think it is necessary to acknowledge at the outset—in slight contradiction to the hon. Member for North Northumberland, although I hope that this will not be taken as too Christo-chauvinist a perspective, nor as a sort of Christian supremacist principle—the reason that we in this country defend the liberties we do on behalf of all religions and belief systems around the world, as the hon. Gentleman mentioned. It is because of the Christian foundation to our politics. All our liberties, and the principle of political liberty that this country has sporadically, with some success and some failures, helped to export around the world, derive fundamentally from the Christian foundations of our political institutions and political philosophy. What we think of as the intrinsic value of every human being comes only from one place: the Bible. All our laws and what we now call human rights have that origin. Indeed, the very concept of the secular space, in which people are free to believe anything or nothing, derives ultimately from the Christian principle that everybody has value, and that it is not right to pry into the souls of other men or women. I do not agree with the hon. Member for North Northumberland that we derive our legitimacy to speak in this space because of our past sins, as a country or as a civilisation. I recognise those sins, but I think we are speaking on this topic because we are the heirs to a tradition that fundamentally recognises the value of Christianity. His regional patriotism for Northumberland is understandable—think of St Cuthbert and the great saints of those days—but I bring him King Alfred, who defended Wessex, including what is now Wiltshire, against the Vikings, pushed back the tide of paganism, restored Christianity to England and ultimately helped to export it to the world. I think it appropriate to be proud of the Christian basis of our politics in this debate.