If governments let themselves be fully bound by the decisions of their parliaments without protecting their own freedom to act a breakup of Europe would be a more probable outcome than deeper integration.

The Bill of Rights was intended to secure freedom of speech - the freedom of speech of members of parliament to speak freely rather than be at threat of... the threat of an over powerful monarch at the time.

Machiavelli's teaching would hardly have stood the test of Parliamentary government for public discussion demands at least the profession of good faith.

And obviously with hindsight now now knowing what went on in the company it would have been absolutely appropriate back then for us to have the chief executive of the company most senior person in the United Kingdom come and answer for the policy they were pursuing. And we ducked that and frankly that's a failure of Parliament.

And think of how we challenged the idea of a male dominated Parliament with All-Women shortlists and made the cause of gender equality central to our government. We were right to do so.

I was elected to the Diet in the same way as at every parliamentary election.

I suppose not everyone has a dad who wrote a book saying he didn't believe in the Parliamentary road to socialism.

Even before he came to power in 1997 Gordon Brown promised to change the accounts to parliament from simple litanies of cash in and cash out to a more commercial system that took notice of the public property the departments were using. This system is known as resource accounting.

People feel that the EU is a one-way process a great machine that sucks up decision-making from national parliaments to the European level until everything is decided by the EU. That needs to change.

We as conservative intellectuals should not be in the business of making excuses for bad parliamentary decisions by Republican leaders in Congress.