Sir Edward Leigh
MP for Gainsborough · Conservative · United Kingdom
“Those of us who love the Jewish people and faith know that the reason why they have overcome all the empires that have tried to destroy them is that they are primarily people of the book and not the sword, but what is happening in the west bank is violent and egregious.”
“I am grateful to the Secretary of State for looking again at Lincolnshire. I made the point to her predecessor that the proposal for a Greater Lincolnshire authority was, in the eyes of many people, just a gerrymander. Will she look again at it and stop dividing West Lindsey and North Kesteven in half?”
“If the centre does not take action, nasty extremes will take over. The fact is that we are in acute danger. These people can now launch from anywhere on the north French coast and are escorted to our shores. Frankly, we are being invaded, and the public are completely fed up.”
“May I congratulate the Prime Minister on what he said about Ukraine and on how he conducted himself there? Our enemies should know that this House is completely and utterly united in standing behind the Ukrainian people.”
“What concerns me is the jobs of my constituents who work at Scunthorpe. That is all I am worried about; I have no ideological objection. If it is what is needed now, fair enough. As long as the blast furnaces are totally uneconomic because of high energy costs, however, it can only be a sticking plaster.”
“One of the poorest wards in the entire country is Gainsborough south-west ward. Why is the Secretary of State splitting West Lindsey in half? Why is he taking Scampton away from Gainsborough? It makes no sense. Why is he cutting away the nuclear fusion site from Lincoln?”
The complete record
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“I would like to associate myself with the arguments that have been adduced today by the Solicitor General and by my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis). I am afraid that I must disagree with my other very good friend, my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis). Nobody doubts his complete honesty and passion in these matters, and I hope that he does not accuse me of being an authoritarian, because I really am not. I hope I am as committed to civil liberties as anybody, but we are under a ruthless attack. The Minister mentioned 28 attacks, and we all know the appalling atrocities that have been committed on our streets in recent years. We all know about the Manchester bombing and about Lee Rigby. The list is endless.”
“I apologise for missing that. I was summoned in to see the Speaker, as I warned the Deputy Speaker, so I missed that part of my right hon. Friend’s speech, but I listened to everything that was said in the early part of the debate, and I followed it carefully. I made an intervention on the Opposition spokesman, and I still believe it. I frankly trust Mr Blair and Mr Brown more than I trust the former leader of the Labour party on these issues.”
“Of course I agree with that, and I wanted to make that point as best I could. It is quite a weak argument to say that, because certain people who have been in authoritative positions make a certain argument, that it is therefore a clincher in argumentation. Actually, the point put by my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East was far more powerful, frankly. He was adducing a specific example. If it is laid down in statute that a covert agent cannot take a particular action, that is an invitation to terrorist or gangster groups to have an initiation ceremony based precisely on what is forbidden by Parliament. I thought that that was a completely unanswerable argument.”
“Can we not trust our operatives in MI5, MI6 or the police force to act proportionately and in a necessary way?”
“Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden, who tells me that in New Zealand and Australia they do things in a different way and are at no higher risk. In any court of law, the evidence adduced by my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East is more powerful than the arguments adduced by my other right hon. Friend. We have just heard a passionate defence of children. No one denies the commitment of the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) to the welfare of children, but when I was reading about this debate in some Sunday papers and other parts of the media at the weekend, it gave the impression that we were almost going back to Stalin’s Russia, and getting children to spy on their parents. This is ridiculous—we have to have a sense of proportion. We live in the United Kingdom. We have a system of law.”
“Exactly, and I hazard a guess—as we have seen with the covid outbreak—we are a uniquely open society. We have very large levels of immigration. We have large minority communities. By the way, 99.9% totally oppose terrorists, do not believe in that and all the rest of it, but we know we are fundamentally and hugely vulnerable as a nation, probably much more vulnerable than Australia or New Zealand, so the fact that Australia does certain things does not apply. Personally, speaking for myself, I would rather listen to arguments from my right hon. Friend the Chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee, who has been briefed by MI5 and MI6, than to arguments adduced at second hand by my right hon.”
“I suspect that if we use minors who are 16 or 17 in a certain way that is done very carefully. I suspect that we are not initiating any new behaviour at all and we are rescuing young people from cruel fate.”
“I am sorry, we already have human rights legislation—my right hon. Friend places a lot of faith in that. Like my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East, I think we have seen numerous instances where our armed forces have been treated appallingly in the past. There is great public concern about that. We do not want to put our security services, who are living in an infinitely more dangerous world, in the same position in which we put our armed forces. The Bill as it stands is proportionate and reasonable, and there has to be an element of trust. Personally, I think that it is extraordinarily unlikely in our country that MI5, MI6 or the police forces would act in such a way that if we knew what they were doing we would be horrified and think it was corrupt or that they were somehow abusing children.”
“Such authorisations would only need to be notified to the judicial commissioners within seven days of them being granted. That means that they might cancel an authorisation, and insist that the activities carried out under it cease immediately, in the middle of the very acts in question. As I understand it—I may be wrong—the amendment would therefore undermine the very ability of our security services to recruit covert human intelligence sources. I mention that point because am not sure that it has already been raised in this debate. Let us be reasonable and proportionate, and let us leave the Bill as it is.”
“I think that is powerful evidence. This is about common sense; it is about proportionality and being reasonable. We cannot use law or statute to provide a sort of envelope around every action that the security services do. In the real world that does not work. It may be counterproductive, dangerous, and could put our own people at danger. Finally, perhaps the Minister can comment on the fact that Lords amendment 5 would require all criminal conduct authorisation to be notified to the judicial commissioners, as set out in the Investigatory Powers Act 2016. Again, that sounds reasonable, but it also provides the judicial commissioners with the power to cancel an authorisation if they determine that it should not have been granted. That would require the covert activity to cease immediately.”
“May we just leave London for a moment? There is a real dissonance between what people pay in a big city such as London and what people pay and get back in a rural area such as West Lindsey, with which my right hon. Friend is very familiar. We pay slightly more and we get a lot less— sometimes not even a street lamp; maybe a rubbish collection every two weeks—so can he address this real issue on behalf of rural people and say what he is doing to help us in rural areas?”
“As one said, and this was nearly 10 years ago: “This is a matter of urgency.” Another said: “Sadly my husband died four years ago without the assurance that…he…would ever be recompensed.” One wrote: “I am 89 years old, now a widow.” So I repeat the call from my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East: let us have an inquiry from the PAC, let us have the full light of transparency on this and let justice be done for some of the most elderly and vulnerable—and responsible—in our community.”
“I know that full compensation would be expensive, but as my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East said, let justice be done and let there be full transparency. People need to save for their retirement. Living off their state pension affords little comfort, and most people do not realistically expect to be able to live off it. Very few young people even think about their retirement. But these policyholders did save for their retirement. They are now getting on, and they are elderly and often vulnerable. Over the years, I have received terrible, sad letters from many of my constituents, some of them received as much as 10 years ago. Some of them will now, I am afraid, no longer be with us.”
“These were caught not by the Treasury, but by policyholders themselves. There is also a lack of transparency over how policyholders can verify that the amount they have received is correct. The Equitable Members Action Group has pointed out: “There is serious doubt over the accuracy and reliability of the methodology used by the Treasury to calculate what’s owed.” The Treasury insists that there were no mistakes. If so, how can the Government explain inaccurate payments? One hundred and sixty complaints of inaccuracy in payment were upheld, yet EMAG reports only eight received recalculations. The Minister needs to explain how this happened. We must remember that many hundreds of thousands of policyholders were affected by this scandal. The Government scheme offered only partial compensation.”
“All those showed lessons to be learned, both in terms of corporate culture in financial services and in terms of the state’s role in overseeing the sector sufficiently. Everyone acknowledges that the company was primarily at fault, but the state has a role and a responsibility in regulating financial services. All business today is conducted on the understanding that ultimately, the law and the state ensure an honest and transparent playing field. More than a decade ago, in 2010, George Osborne announced a £1.5 billion package in compensation. These payments were to begin in mid-July of 2011, but by the end of 2011, many of my affected constituents had not received a penny. Not only were there delays in payments, but some payments were made for incorrect amounts—sometimes wildly inaccurate.”
“I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) for the way that he introduced the debate, and I am proud, with him, to be a sponsor of it. This has turned into a saga, which has now been ongoing for decades. The facts of the original case are well known; we have seen them demonstrated again and again. There were dubious practices. This was a company that was too big to fail. Perhaps, as my hon. Friend said, there was a conspiracy to stop matters coming to light before they did. There was a culture of manipulation and concealment. In addition to the Treasury’s own 2004 report, there have been other reports: the report from Lord Penrose in 2001, and a report from Ian Glick and Richard Snowden.”
“I understand the point my right hon. Friend is making, and we do not have a free trade deal with China at the moment, and we are not likely to, but many of us for years have been frustrated that every time we try to raise genocide in this place in terms of trade deals, we are told that it is subject to the international courts, and that China, Russia or other countries in the UN Security Council have a veto on the matter. Is there any way we can acknowledge that genocide is taking place in a country when we do a trade deal, without losing parliamentary control of our trade deals, and without getting trade deals bogged down for months or even years in courts?”
“Friend the Member for North Somerset (Dr Fox), a former International Trade Secretary, said, let us have a proper parliamentary scrutiny system so that as we embark on a trade deal the Select Committee can consider it in detail at the start and can report back to Parliament, so that we can debate it and give either instructions or guidance to Government. That is the way the Government should proceed, and I commend that approach to them this evening.”
“But then she started talking about other countries. She started talking about Egypt, Israel, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Where would it all stop? Any trade deal could be bound up for months—years—in the courts, and any group could take the Government to court. I voted for Brexit to take back control. I am a free trader; I believe in international free trade. I want these free trade deals, but there is one very important point that I hope the Minister will address when he winds up. There is a lacuna in parliamentary scrutiny of these trade deals; there is no doubt about it. It is simply far too late to conduct a trade deal, agree it and then at the very last minute send it to the International Trade Committee. Sometimes there is no opportunity for Parliament to discuss it at all. As my right hon.”
“Some people around the world think that our human rights record, for instance in Ireland, is not that great. What would we think if we were going to do a trade deal with somebody and some group took us to court in, say, Japan? Would we ever turn up in some Japanese court and defend our position? No, we would think that that would be a fundamental denial of the supremacy of this Parliament. So I do not think that the court route is the right approach. I listened to the Opposition spokesman, the right hon. Member for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry), and was quite alarmed by what she said. We all know that what is happening to the Uyghurs is quite appalling. We suspect that it is genocide, and we think that if there is any sort of trade deal with China we should question it very closely.”
“It is true that our efforts to name and shame on genocide and to act on it have been stymied in the international courts. On the one hand, we have said that it is for the courts to decide. On the other, because of the power of veto of major players on the world stage, international courts will not act. We have to remember that we are Members of Parliament. We are elected. We are the high court of Parliament. It is for elected officials, not court officials, to decide trade policy. Any other approach would be utterly chaotic. I am a barrister. I know that when we accuse somebody in a court, the defendant has a right to turn up. Do we really think that, if we accused any country—China, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, Egypt—they would agree for a moment to send counsel to defend their position? Look at it from our point of view.”
“I think we need to be far more robust about calling out genocide when it takes place. I can do no better than quote our present Prime Minister, writing in the Financial Times in 2016, when he criticised the Foreign Office because “for some baffling reason the Foreign Office still hesitates to use the term genocide” about the attacks on the Yazidis. In our own lifetimes, we have seen appalling acts of violence based purely on people’s ethnicity. We need to be robust. I was originally attracted to the amendments, particularly as they come from good friends such as Lord Forsyth and Lord Alton. I am grateful to the Minister for having spoken to me earlier today, and to his colleague in the Foreign Office. I listened to every word the Minister said. Although I was attracted to the Alton amendment, I now think there are serious faults with it.”
“There is one overseas territory that is intimately connected to the EU: Gibraltar, which values its financial independence. I would just like to use this opportunity—I am sure the Minister will not mind commenting—to reassure the people of Gibraltar that their financial services are absolutely safe under this Government and this Bill.”
“Riots in north-east Delhi last year resulted in Muslim homes and businesses being destroyed; of the 53 dead from six days of violence, two thirds were Muslims—who had been shot, slashed or set on fire. India is the world’s largest functioning democracy, and we should be proud of that. We are inextricably linked to India through our shared history, not all of which has been happy or peaceful. With more than 1 billion people, it is the largest Commonwealth country by a huge margin. On a number of fronts, India is a friend of Britain and a country we want to trade with more, deal with more, and visit. However, true friendship requires not turning a blind eye to each other’s faults, and we must protest the violence and persecution in India today. I hope that this debate is a small step in the right direction.”
“In recent years, they have taken place in 24 out of India’s 29 states. In Odisha state in May 2019, local officials sent a team of 50 workers to demolish a Christian school and children’s hostel near Lichapeta. The school’s application for recognition of land tenure was suspiciously lost. Hindutva nationalism is pervading the actions of many officials in the Indian Government, from the Ministers at the top to local government bureaucrats. Before I sit down, it would be quite wrong not to mention—as I think I have already said once, but I now emphasise—that the overwhelming victims of violence and discrimination in India are Muslims, and this follows decades of discrimination.”
“In the first six months of 2020 one Indian NGO recorded 293 cases of persecution.” Bishop Gerald Almeida of Jabalpur says: “It is a cause of concern with the Church because Christians are being killed and beaten…There are much more attacks than ten years ago. Fundamentalism is a real problem.” The Indian Government’s own figures, released in 2018, show an upward trend in inter-religious violence, and one has to ask why there is an upward trend. Is the tone being set by Government themselves? In 2016, 86 people were killed in sectarian violence and 2,321 were injured in 703 incidents. The following year, that rose to 111 people killed and 2,384 injured; there were 822 incidents in 2017. Between 2017 and the end of March 2019, there were more than 1,000 individual attacks on Christians. The attacks are also widespread.”
“In 2015, Rajnath Singh, India’s then Minister of Home Affairs, called for a national debate on anti-conversion laws and said that one was needed at national level. However, although the Indian Government undoubtedly set an antichristian and anti-Muslim tone, I am afraid—well, I am not afraid; it is just a fact—that the fact is that violent intimidation at street level does the most harm, and much more harm than the Government or what they say. As reported by Aid to the Church in Need—by the way, I am closely connected with Aid to the Church in Need; it does wonderful work throughout the world and should be congratulated on its very detailed reports—there was “no sign of anti-Christian violence abating during India’s COVID-19 lockdown.”
“We just have to accept this, and our Government, in their dealings with the Modi Government, have to accept that the BJP has sharpened its tone against India’s religious minorities. There is absolutely no doubt about that; it is on the record. Between 1967 and 2020, six states introduced laws or ordinances aiming to stop conversions. It is a dangerous thing to convert to Christianity in India, but there has to be some equivalence drawn, too. Let us make it absolutely clear that it is even more dangerous to convert to Christianity in Pakistan. We have to condemn absolutely this feeling in many countries of the world that it is wrong to convert or change religion, in any direction. Those ordinances and laws are often made, perversely, in the guise of protecting freedom of religion.”
“Despite the electoral success of Modi and the BJP, it has to be said that although Hindus are still the overwhelming part of the population, their proportion of the population has been declining. No doubt that engenders a feeling of threat, but, dare I say it—I am not here to lecture anybody else’s country—nobody needs to feel under threat from Islam or Christianity in India. Hinduism will always be an absolutely integral part of the nation and overwhelmingly the majority religion. Despite that and perhaps for political reasons—this is where nationalism is extremely dangerous—politicians around the world feel that they can use religion quite wrongly to promote themselves, get into office and stir up their followers.”
“I do not condone Hindu nationalism in any way, but we need to understand how Hindus feel that theirs is the religion of India. That said, there have been Muslims in India for many hundreds of years, so presumably they were living there when they originally converted to Islam. The same applies to Christianity. Christianity is also integral to India. There have been Christians in India for the best part of 2,000 years. It is the third largest religion. There are 200 million Muslims, but there are still 30 million Christians—a huge number—in the country. According to legend and, undoubtedly, in fact, India was one of the first lands reached by early Christians. In Kerala, they date their Christianity back to the Apostle Thomas himself. And parts of north-eastern India even have a Christian majority.”
“Actually, in recent years the Government have had the courage to stand up more and more for human rights, the right of Christians to profess their faith and the rights of people of other faiths to convert to Christianity. These Westminster Hall debates may not seem important in the great scheme of things, but they are all part of a pressure on the Government, and our Government has a moral duty to speak out as for centuries—certainly for the last century—Governments have spoken out in favour of human rights throughout the world. I hesitated to take part in the debate because India is an incredibly complex country with an amazing history. Hinduism is integral to India—80% of the population are Hindus—and it is the most wonderful religion. Those who go to India, as I have, realise that it is part of the country’s DNA.”
“We should congratulate the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) on ensuring that we had the debate and on the comprehensive way in which he moved it. I suppose we started having such debates—some instituted by him and others by me—20 years ago, and I think we have made progress in ensuring that the Government take a more active role in such matters. When we started off, Governments were, frankly, careful to be equidistant: they said, “On the one hand, there is persecution of Christians, but on the other hand, that.” The truth is that, although in India the victims of persecution are overwhelmingly Muslims, the victims of persecution worldwide are overwhelmingly Christian.”
“On that point, to me, the right strategy to stop the NHS being overwhelmed seems to be to have a flexible tier system, whereby we work out whether local hospitals in each region are about to be overwhelmed; and, if they are, we go into lockdown. Does my hon. Friend understand what I am saying? Is there going to be this flexible approach, rather than this mass lockdown nationally?”
“They are the people whom we should be protecting and they are the people whom we should be vaccinating, and we have to allow the rest of society to get on with their own business and to preserve their freedoms.”
“Looking at every region and every hospital, we should ask ourselves whether the NHS was in danger of not having capacity in that local area, and then we should have brought in local lockdowns for that area. As soon as a vaccination programme rolls out, we must move to a tiered approach. When next winter comes, we have to accept that there is a difference between morbidity and mortality. People do die: 20,000 or 30,000 people a year die, very sadly, from flu. Next winter we cannot close down the entire country. We have to have some regard for freedom and the ability of people to make informed decisions about their own lives. The real risk of this pandemic is overwhelmingly to people who are over 80.”
“People ask me why I have gone along with this so far, and it is for one reason only: we are told that the NHS—because so many beds, wrongly, have been stripped from the NHS over the last 10 years—was in danger of falling down, so that should be the approach of the Government. If we are to restrict people’s freedom, we should only do it because we are worried that the NHS may lose capacity, and people may be arriving in hospital and there is not the capacity to treat them. We should learn the lessons from this pandemic. We should restrict civil liberties for as short a time as possible and as little as possible, because that is fundamentally what we believe in, although it may be necessary for a short time. What should be the approach now? It should be a tiered approach. It should always have been a tiered approach.”
“As I was waiting in the Library for this debate to start, I happened to notice on the shelves a book about Edmund Burke, and as this debate is about the balance between the freedom of the individual and the authority of the Government, I opened it at random and I found this quote: “The Mass of Mankind are made to be led by others. Habits & Customs are their support, because it would be impossible that civil Society could subsist long if we were all Philosophers. Subordination, therefore, is necessary for the human mind.” My question is whether that is actually correct. I believe that conservatism—and I put the emphasis on conservatism as a philosophy; I am not just talking about the Conservative Government—is about freedom and trusting the individual and individual authority.”
“There are about 100 small rural villages in my Gainsborough constituency, and I doubt there has been any building of social housing in any of them over the past 40 years. It is virtually impossible for young couples, who often do precisely the jobs we want in rural areas, to buy into villages. We do not want our English villages filled with people like me; we want young people. [ Interruption. ] That is the truth. Will the Secretary of State do a massive campaign, like the Macmillan campaign at the beginning of the 1950s, to build social housing and rent to buy in our rural villages in England?”
“On carers, in particular, I noticed that the Gainsborough testing centre was turning away people who were not showing symptoms, but surely we want to encourage all carers of all elderly people to be tested. Let us get rid of all these bureaucratic hurdles and get more reliance on self-reliance.”
“I thank the Prime Minister for listening to our representations on keeping places of worship open. Does this not show how, if we work together with a pragmatic approach, we can reopen the economy sensibly? Many of us who will vote for the Government tonight out of loyalty, or because we want to preserve the Government’s authority, are worried that every successive lockdown is less and less effective. That is because while every death is tragic, young people will have noticed reports that out of a population of tens of millions, only 400 healthy people between 16 and 60 have actually died. Will the Prime Minister tell people like me in the priority groups that there has to be an element of self-reliance, self-isolation and looking after our own health, and that we cannot just rely on successive lockdowns?”
“I have just been talking to my right hon. Friend the Member for North Somerset (Dr Fox) who is a doctor. He showed me the ridiculous form that he has had to fill in to be able to give this simple jab—all this diversity and equality training. When he is inoculating an old lady, he is not going to ask her whether she has come into contact with jihadis or whatever. The Secretary of State must cut through all this bureaucratic rubbish.”
“I congratulate the right hon. and learned Gentleman on doing the patriotic and right thing today, but there is quite a lot of interest in the country in what deal he would have negotiated if he had been responsible for the negotiations.”
“On behalf of my right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes), may I thank the Secretary of State for meeting us and for promising that he will adopt a more granular approach? We can assure him that we will work hard in Lincolnshire to try to get our tier, and that of the neighbouring cities, down. May I also thank him and the Prime Minister for resisting pressure from the Opposition and from Wales and Scotland to change the rules on Christmas? That is entirely the right approach. I also thank him for the tone that he has adopted today in saying that, if we are to defeat this, it is a matter of self-responsibility and personal ownership of our health.”
“Sooner or later, there is going to be an appalling tragedy in the channel. The reason economic migrants make this crossing is that they know that our present asylum laws are a complete joke. If someone makes it halfway across the channel, their chances of ever being deported are virtually nil, because of the activities of so-called human rights lawyers, who are actually putting lives at risk by their shenanigans in the law courts. What we want from the Minister is a firm commitment that, from 1 January, if someone crosses the channel and it is obvious that they are coming from a safe country, they will be immediately returned—that is what we want to know.”
“In the 19th century, the House of Commons established its legacy on behalf of the enslaved and persecuted people in the world with the slavery and emancipation Acts. Is the Minister aware, after these questions, that whatever action he takes, the House of Commons will give him full support? The Chinese Government do not care a damn about mere words; only action will persuade them. Will he therefore summon the UK fashion industry to tell it that, unless it can prove that cotton is not picked with slave labour, it will stop importing from China? Will he also pursue the Magnitsky sanctions point, and will he, after Brexit, pursue with our allies the point on trade sanctions?”
“Will my right hon. Friend spare a thought for rural Britain? Policies that may work for, say, London, which covers 600 square miles and has 73 MPs, are a lot more difficult to implement in Gainsborough, which covers nearly 500 square miles and has only one MP—albeit a very good one, I have to say. Our rural lines were stripped away by Dr Beeching. If I want to take a bus to the nearest town, it takes an hour, going around about 10 villages, and if I want to walk, it is a four-hour round trip, so we rely on the internal combustion engine. Frankly, an electric charging point in West Lindsey is about as rare as an oasis in a desert. Can we have some practical policies to help rural Britain?”
“When I was a spear carrier in the Brexit referendum campaign led by my right hon. Friend, we assured the British people that a trade deal was entirely achievable, so may I urge him to make one last effort? Surely that deal is achievable, because we have no intention of lowering our standards, but the EU should know this: if, consistent with national security, he cannot secure that deal for us, this parliamentary party will back him to the hilt, because strength comes with unity.”
“Of course we all want agreement and we all want a trade deal, but what happens if relations break down? Will the right hon. Gentleman confirm that, first and foremost, the Labour party is a Unionist party that believes 100% in the economic integrity of the United Kingdom and will not act as a poodle for nationalists? Can he give me an absolute guarantee that if relations break down and we reject this Bill, we will not be in a very difficult place in terms of the economic integrity of the United Kingdom?”
“There has been virtually no discussion during this entire debate about the fact that this is a safety net, which we hope will never be used. If we are on the high wire—and when we are dealing with the EU, we are on the high wire—we may not want to use a safety net, but it does no harm to have one.”
“I am afraid that there are a lot of people trying to take part, so if you want me to get you all in, we will have to limit you to three minutes. I am sorry.”