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Iran Opposition & Resistance

Former UK Parliament Speaker John Bercow: “You Cannot Execute an Idea”

Written by Shamsi Saadati
Former UK Parliament Speaker John Bercow addresses an international conference on the execution of political prisoners on April 10, 2026
Former UK Parliament Speaker John Bercow addresses an international conference on the execution of political prisoners on April 10, 2026

On April 10, 2026, at an international conference held near Paris, former Speaker of the House of Commons John Bercow addressed a gathering of members of the Iranian Resistance and parliamentary colleagues. He expressed his firm support for the Iranian people and their resistance, highlighting the stark contrast between the courage of those fighting for freedom and the actions of the current regime. Bercow emphasized that while the regime can imprison or harm individuals, the “flame of freedom” and the core idea of democratic liberty cannot be executed.

Bercow directed sharp criticism toward the “son of the Shah,” Reza Pahlavi, describing him as a “monumental, everlasting sideshow” who is “irrelevant to the real struggle”. He argued that the Iranian people are unlikely to turn to the son of a former autocrat who “pillaged the country,” suggesting instead that Pahlavi take up hobbies like “Japanese basket weaving” or “specialist cooking” rather than “muddying the waters” of Iran’s future. 

Excerpts of John Bercow’s speech follow:

We are here to honor lives lost, not beliefs defeated. And that is the most critical recognition which must underlie all of our pronouncements today and the activities that flow thereafter. It seems a rather obvious point, my friends, but I think it’s a point that the IRGC simply does not grasp. I genuinely believe that in addition to being a mendacious, murderous mullah gang, they also lack one other very important human quality: they have absolutely no EQ. They have no emotional intelligence whatsoever. They simply don’t grasp that you can kill people, you can maim people, you can incarcerate people, you can threaten people, you can intimidate people, but you cannot make people think what they don’t think, and you cannot make them not think what they do think.

And the people of the National Council of Resistance of Iran and of the MEK resistance units, not to forget the magnificent heroes and heroines of Ashraf-3, are people who believe in freedom. And that idea cannot be executed. You cannot execute an idea. And just as you cannot execute an idea, you cannot execute a conviction as to its ultimate triumph. You simply cannot do that.

And so I hope belatedly, because the regime, let’s face it… they are very, very, very slow learners. If they were in the classroom, I think they would almost certainly come bottom because their comprehension is so poor. But I hope eventually the regime will come to understand that no matter how long they murder, no matter how long they maim, no matter how long they threaten and intimidate and seek to subjugate, they will not extinguish the flame of freedom, because the flame of freedom burns brightly in the breasts of decent people right across the globe, irrespective of their race, their color, their creed, or their nationality.

There is no disguising the fact that the recent execution of the heroic 13, on top of the execution of so many thousands over the decades, is a tragedy. It’s a tragedy that their lives have been snuffed out, and it’s a tragedy, of course, for their loved ones who remain and who will never forget the loss or fully overcome the bereavement. But the truth is, as has been said by earlier speakers, the fact of the executions will not be the key part of the historical record. The fact of the perseverance to victory championed by those brave souls will be.

And I remember, a couple of years ago when I came to a National Council of Resistance of Iran event and there was, my friends, an interlude during which I had the pleasure of sitting with senior members of the National Council in a restaurant and having some lunch. And I was so cheeky, well-intentioned but I suppose cheeky and perhaps presumptuous to inquire of one lady whether she was herself a mother. And she told me that yes, she was a mother, and her son had perished in the struggle. And I immediately apologized to her and said I was sorry for bringing up what must have been a painful memory for her. And with a quite extraordinary display of stoicism and fortitude, with no sign of being perturbed let alone angered, she said, no, it had fired her up, was the essence of what she said. It had underscored her absolutely unbreakable determination to continue the struggle for as long as the struggle needed to be continued.

And that wonderful woman’s story, as you all know, is replicated in the experience of dozens, no, hundreds, no, thousands of people who support the NCRI, for whom the fact of loss cannot be denied but will never be allowed by those people to stymie, thwart, diminish or temper their resolution to deliver change.

So what I want to say to you first and foremost is that although the behavior of the regime is truly bestial, barbaric, brutalist in the extreme, and although the recent misguided effort militarily to displace the regime has been, frankly, a wasteful distraction, what should emerge from the physical and almost rhetorical debris of recent weeks is a very clear image of contrast… between courage represented by the National Council of Resistance of Iran, the PMOI, the MEK resistance units on the one hand, and utter, despicable, contemptible cowardice on the other.

Let’s just reflect on that concept of courage. The word courage is sometimes used too frequently and too loosely, but not in this case. Courage is not doing something that’s wild or thoughtless with too big a price paid for it. That’s not of itself courage; it could well be recklessness. Courage is insisting on championing your cause even when you know for certain that doing so is likely to bring your own demise. That is courage. And some of the people who’ve lost their lives in support of the struggle have been people with the most extraordinary futures ahead of them, people of great gifts, people of great accomplishments, people of great potential who had a zest for life, but their zest for life was exceeded by one material thing, and that was a commitment to the future of their people as a collective, as a whole, as a nation. Now that is courage. That is heroism on a scale which I think defies the imagination of most of us.

Could I do it? I couldn’t. But can I see and admire someone who can? I can and I do. The only courage required in being a speaker of a parliament in a democracy is being prepared to risk the wrath, the anger, the criticism, the briefing in the media or whatever on the part of a government that is irritated with you. That’s nothing. That’s trivial. That’s completely insignificant. What the people fighting for freedom in Iran are doing is fighting physically and spiritually, morally, rhetorically in the full knowledge that their lives could end that day or the next.

That is an essay, no, it is a full-length novel in courage. So, let’s put our hands together in appreciation of the courage of the fallen. I hope eventually the regime will come to understand that no matter how long they murder, no matter how long they maim, no matter how long they threaten and intimidate and seek to subjugate, they will not extinguish the flame of freedom. What I would say to representatives of the regime is very simply this: you don’t quite get the idea of public service. You don’t really quite understand what it’s about. So let me try to explain it very simply. The purpose of electing a parliament from which a government is drawn is not that the government should serve itself, but that the government should serve the people to whom it is accountable.

And I remember one of my old friends in Parliament who died a decade or so ago, one of the great parliamentarians in the British Parliament, who used towards the end of his life to make a very fine speech, one of the shortest speeches he ever made, and it went like this: Whenever I meet anybody with power, I always ask that person five questions: What power have you got? Who gave it to you? In whose interest do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? And how can we get rid of you? And when you think about it, I know it’s a simple idea, that really is what public service and the democratic principle, the concept of accountability, are all about. The regime just doesn’t get it.

But in the kindest, most gentle, most understated, most polite way, what I would say to son of Khamenei, who seems to me to have done nothing of any use or value in the course of his life at all, is this: Sir, Sir, put on your big boy pants, try to escape from the kindergarten and become an adult. And if you think your regime is so good and does such good things and is such a good government for the people, why not try something really, really, really radical?

Stop telling the people what they must have and instead, as Mrs. Rajavi has been championing for decades, ask people what they want. That is the essence of democracy. And if the regime can’t get that, if they can’t grasp that, if that concept is not able to penetrate their dense skulls, there is no helping them. But what we know is that we will go on championing that cause indefinitely, for as long as is necessary, in support of Mrs. Rajavi’s 10-point plan.

I’ve reserved my most ferocious excoriation for the regime because it has the highest per capita use of the death penalty of any regime anywhere in the world. One of the things I’ve always found most shocking and most objectionable about it is that it lathers itself with a kind of religious justification when the way it behaves is the violation of every decent principle of every worthy religion known to humankind. It’s not a regime forged by or based on or committed to love, but rather committed to and the practitioner of hate. But I must just reserve a few words for son of Shah. Now, I suppose one ought to feel a bit sorry for the chappy, but as far as son of Shah is concerned, may I be permitted, my friends, to say this: Son of Shah, Mr. Pahlavi, you don’t seem to realize it, but you are one gigantic, monumental, everlasting sideshow. You are a sideshow, sir. You are irrelevant to the real struggle, which is a struggle between a bestial, barbaric, bilious regime and Mrs. Rajavi’s championship of freedom.

Now I mean, I don’t know what it’s like to live in the lap of luxury, my friends, because I’ve never done so. I’ve worked all my life as I hope my children, my three children, will work all their lives. Mr. Pahlavi cannot be accused of too much arduous work over the decades. He was born into enormous wealth and privilege; he scuttled off to the United States four and a half decades ago.

I’m not aware of anything useful he’s done since, but apparently, he goes to bed at night, my source tells me, eagerly entertaining the hope that the moment is nigh, the prince over the water who will come to the rescue and achieve a position of leadership. Well, I stopped believing in fairy tales before I became a teenager. This guy’s now in his mid-60s… I have to say to him just as our little secret between Mr. Pahlavi and me: Mate, you are deluded. In political terms, you are off your chump. You haven’t got a clue. It’s not going to happen.

The idea that the mass of the people of Iran are going to say to the son of the most appalling autocrat who pillaged the country and presided over mass destruction, ‘Please, sir, we know you haven’t got much of a curriculum vitae, we know you haven’t done much by way of effective work in your life, but we’d really like you to be our next leader’ – Mr. Pahlavi, it isn’t going to happen. Do something else. Take up golf. Undergo a course in Japanese basket weaving. Become a specialist cook. Study the great philosophers. Read a collection of Greek mythology. My dear chap, I don’t mind what it is, but stop muddying the waters as far as the future of Iran is concerned.

The future of Iran is going to come down to whether this regime can cling on or whether we – and I do say we – are going to win. And I feel absolute confidence in my bones, in my heart as well as in my head, that the people who have made the sacrifices and devoted their lives to the struggle for freedom will come to be seen as the only and the legitimate alternative to the bestial dictatorship in Tehran. And that’s why I very much want to visit Ashraf-3 ere long because I’d like to pay my respects directly to our friends there.

But that’s why in common Mrs. Rajavi with so many of your admirers from across Europe and around the world, one of my remaining ambitions – I don’t have ambitions otherwise, my political career is over, I richly enjoyed it – but one of my remaining ambitions is to be able to come to Tehran when the struggle has succeeded, democratic elections have been achieved, a new constitution has been ratified and a far superior course has been charted for the people of Iran.

It has about it, my friends, all the inevitability of the passage of the seasons. It is a matter of time. We cannot know exactly how much, but what we do know is that people who believe in good values will go nowhere. We’re going nowhere. We’re going to make the arguments over and over and over again. And let’s just gently remind the regime: What you’ve done is execrable and appalling. But don’t think you’re getting away with it, because as Hertha so powerfully reminded us in her speech, there comes a day of reckoning. And just as the Nazis paid the price in the Nuremberg trials, so the appalling dictatorship in Tehran will have to pay the price. There will be no impunity.

The day of reckoning will arrive. So they will have to pay for their sins and the democrats of the National Council of Resistance of Iran will be in pole position to seek the support of the people of Iran to rule in their interest and then yes, at the end of a term of government which will be specified quite clearly its length, the National Council will ask the people of Iran, do you want us to continue? I think I know what the answer will be. My friends, let us regard recent calamities, personal tragedies and challenges as reminders of the importance of our cause. Our cause will not die, our cause will continue, our cause, my friends, will prevail. That is the end of the matter.

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