Philip Davies, an anti-feminist, accused by Labour and Lib Dems of attempting to filibuster bill by talking for too long

A Conservative MP has spoken for more than an hour in the House of Commons to try to derail a bill to protect women against violence.

Philip Davies, the MP for Shipley and an anti-feminist who was recently elected to parliament’s equalities committee, said he thought it was sexist to say the focus should only be on violence against women.

He was unsuccessful in his attempt to stop the passage of the bill, but was accused by Labour and the Liberal Democrats of trying to filibuster the bill by talking for so long that it would run out of time.

The draft legislation brought forward by Eilidh Whiteford, a Scottish National party MP, is intended to force the government to ratify the Istanbul convention on tackling and preventing violence against women.

Feminist zealots want women to have their cake and eat it, says Tory MP Read more

The MP for Banff and Buchan said: “The government needs to take the Istanbul convention out of the bottom drawer where it has been filed for far too long in a pile marked ‘too complicated, too difficult, too low a priority’.

“If parliaments like this one – where the rule of law is well established, where our legislative processes are robust – finds this too difficult to do, how on earth can we ask other countries where they don’t have the same traditions of governance to be following our example?”

It was supported by a number of MPs from all parties, with the vote passing by 135 to two. The government ended up taking the unusual step of supporting the private member’s bill, saying it was committed to implementing the Istanbul convention even though it had some reservations about the way it was drafted.

“At this stage I am pleased to say that the government supports the bill in principle,” said Brandon Lewis, the communities minister.

Jess Phillips, the Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley, said: “For some people, they wake up on Christmas Day and they will try not to say anything wrong. They will try not to put a foot wrong. They will make sure everything is perfect. They will have risk-assessed every single step that they take throughout the day because just this one day their children deserve not to have the monster that lives in their home erupt in their faces.

“Just this one day, their children deserve to have the peaceful day that all of our children have taken for granted and so all of the stresses we’ll feel, for those people, will be terror and control over everything they say and do in order to keep things safe.”

Phillips denied Davies the opportunity to intervene in her comments, but he later made a 78-minute speech saying he had a fundamental objection to the idea that MPs only needed to deal with violence against women.

He said: “It basically comes with a worthy sentiment: who can possibly be against trying to stop violence against women? Nobody. I’m not aware of anybody who wants to argue that people should be violent towards women and girls, of course not.

“Because of the title the bill has, about ‘combating violence against women’, then it presumes as long as you support that premise you must support this particular bill, and therefore if you oppose this bill it means you must be in favour, as it follows, of violence against women and children.

“Now that’s the kind of level of debate I’d expect from the morons on Twitter but I still live in hope that we might have better quality debate than that in this house, although my experience is it doesn’t actually get much better normally.”

He continued: “I can’t really believe this needs saying, to be honest, but I think it’s so discriminatory and sexist to say that we should only be focusing on violence against women. If this was the other way round, there would be an absolute outcry from people in this house – and rightly so. I don’t take the view that violence against women and girls is somehow worse than violence against men and boys.

“As far as I’m concerned, all violence is unacceptable and all violence against the person should be punished by law. Both men and women are victims and both are perpetrators of these crimes. I believe in true equality and want people to be treated equally when they are a victim of crime and when they’re a perpetrator of crime.”

Speaking after him, Thangam Debbonaire, the Labour MP for Bristol West, said she had to cut her contribution short to make sure Davies’s filibustering did not succeed.

The Lib Dem press office tweeted: