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?”
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“My hon. Friend is an exemplar of an assiduous Member of Parliament, and I will certainly encourage the NAO to be an exemplar as well. Let me say in passing that the NAO’s catering team has made a deal with one of its main suppliers to collect and reuse packaging from catering deliveries. Cardboard and single-use plastics have been replaced by reusable plastic crates. Isn’t that marvellous?”
“The circumstantial evidence against Russia is strong—who else would have the motive and the means?—and I will put the same question to the Home Secretary that I put to the Foreign Secretary earlier this week. Those of us who seek to understand Russia know that the only way to preserve peace is through strength. If Russia is behind this, it is a brazen act of war and humiliates our country. I echo the remarks of the junior Defence Minister last week: defence is the first duty of the realm and spending 2% on defence is now not enough.”
“T4. I am sure that in 100 years’ time people will look at our prisons in the same way as we look at Victorian prisons—as being cruel and locking up too many people with health problems. One thing we could do is clear out of our prisons people serving less than a year. It does no good, they are moved around and they cannot be trained. Will the Minister look at that?”
“Over the years, I have tried to understand the Russian position, and particularly the Russian attitude to the right of self-determination of the Russian majority in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, but the way to preserve peace with Russia is by having peace through strength. There is no point in giving commitments to the Baltic states without hardware and men on the ground. Will the Foreign Secretary echo the words of the Under-Secretary of State for Defence, my right hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood), who is sitting next to him and who said in the estimates debate last week that spending 2% on defence was not enough?”
“Thank you for picking the succulent cherry at last, Mr Speaker. It seems to many of us that the Prime Minister’s calm good sense is moving the country from the gloomy valley of “Project Fear,” peopled by the shades of former Prime Ministers, into the hopeful uplands of “Project Reality”. What could be more unifying and more Conservative than her pragmatic approach of proceeding by sensible, pragmatic and moderate steps to re-establish the sovereignty of Parliament?”
“I do not want to go on about that—oceans of ink have been spilt on whether it was right to invade Iraq and to destabilise Saddam, Assad or Gaddafi—but all I will say, as I have said before, is that, in our perfectly justifiable attempts to improve democracy and undermine authoritarian regimes in these countries, we have unleashed totalitarian forces, and the victims of those forces have been the minority Christian communities. I hope the Minister will forgive me if I dwelt at some length on northern Iraq, but it is one of the most horrible, most pitiable and most terrible parts of the world.”
“He notes: “This new approach has shown great early promise at improving efficient use of aid funding, and has significantly improved the confidence of the Christian minorities in the UNDP efforts.” Yes, 3,557 houses have been burnt down, 13,088 houses have been severely damaged, 8,297 have been partly damaged, and reconstruction is very slow. We can be guilty of exacerbating these appalling problems because of our previous foreign policy.”
“DFID should not be allowed to simply provide boilerplate representations regarding the effectiveness of the prior UNDP programs which the UN itself has admitted need to show greater responsiveness to the reality on the ground, a reality in which the Christian churches continue to provide the de facto local government leadership in their region. ” My correspondent cites the example of the $55 million donated by USAID being deployed around the Nineveh plain in a co-ordinated approach, with close contact between the office of the UNDP director for Arab States and the Christian leadership in northern Iraq.”
“Thirdly and finally, our Department for International Development needs to examine closely as a potential model the new co-operative relationship building between the United States Agency for International Development and the UNDP. Our friend on the ground notes: “In particular, we need to examine the structural forms of co-operation and co-ordination which are ensuring that practical and efficient working relationships are being established in which the Christian minorities are properly involved in the rehabilitation process.”
“First, the UK Government need to put pressure on the leaders of the Kurdistan Regional Government and the central Government in Baghdad to resolve their disputes peacefully and swiftly. That is an easy ask, Minister, but it may be more difficult to achieve. The travel blockade that prohibits international air travel to Irbil is particularly debilitating and has had a disastrous effect on humanitarian relief and reconstruction efforts. Secondly, we need to encourage the Iraqi Government to remove all paramilitary forces from the Nineveh plain and replace them with regular Iraqi army and security forces. The Hashd al-Shaabi units there are mostly Shi’a from southern Iraq, with Iranian backing, and their continued presence adds to uncertainty and insecurity about the future.”
“I am relieved to hear that the United Nations Development Programme has changed its previous policy and is now starting to work more closely with Church leadership in Nineveh, which provides almost the only real local government in the area. Hungary has been strong in its work in this field: in addition to appointing an ambassador-at-large for persecuted Christians, it has donated €2 million to help reconstruction in the villages of the Nineveh plain. What can we do? How can the United Kingdom help? I turn to the Minister. Our friend on the ground in northern Iraq has given me concrete suggestions, which I put to the Minister and to which I hope he might respond.”
“As such, there is continual movement back and forth between greater Irbil and the slowly rebuilding towns of Nineveh. ” However, he goes on to point out that there has been almost no return of Christians to Mosul, because of justified fears for their safety in the city. I went to Mosul and saw the Christian communities there before ISIL—because of the appalling events there, nobody in their right mind would have gone anywhere near that city in recent times. Because of the security concerns there, Mosul’s Christians remain displaced. They cannot return home and rebuild their lives, and they cannot help Iraq return to some sense of normality and stability. Our correspondent notes that they “are dependent largely upon the resources of the Christian churches and aid groups.” Again, not all is hopeless; there are signs of progress.”
“I have met this gentleman and talked to him at length, but for security reasons I cannot give his name, because he is resident in the region. The fact I cannot do that, as he is scared for his safety if I read out his testimony, says something about the problems we face. Anyway, our friend in Iraq writes: “The displaced Christians from the historically Christian towns of the Nineveh plain are in the midst of a gradual, often halting, return to their homelands. Of the…100,000 Christians originally displaced from the region, approximately 30,000 to 40,000 have begun efforts to move back. Of these, many have also still retained some form of residence in the greater Irbil region, where they took refuge during their displaced status.”
“I fear that, in failure of the necessary steps, we may only become memories of the past in a very short time.” If one goes to ancient Christian communities in the middle east, one hears the mass said in Aramaic, which is the language of Jesus Christ—the original language. However, we should listen to what the Syriac Orthodox patriarch said about Christians being driven out of the foundation place of Christianity. The situation is not entirely hopeless. Many refugees who were only internally displaced have tried to move home and rebuild their communities. I recently received a memorandum on the current status of Christians in northern Iraq from a member of the senior leadership of the Christian Church community in northern Iraq.”
“There is a Christian Solidarity Worldwide briefing many pages long from which one could take numerous examples, but I want to deal with the persecution of Christians in the Nineveh plains of northern Iraq, mainly because I know the region and have visited it. All but one of the Christian villages I visited in the Assyrian plain near Mosul were overrun. The Iraqi Christian population numbered more than 1.4 million in the 1980s, before our disastrous invasion of Iraq. By mid-2015 it had declined to 275,000, and it had further declined to 200,000 by last year. The Syriac Orthodox patriarch, Ignatius Aphrem II, told the recent Budapest international conference on persecuted Christians: “I am afraid the day will come when our visitors come to see us as dummies in a museum, placed in old churches or monasteries.”
“The Christian community in the holy city united in protest and even closed the Church of the Holy Sepulchre for the first time in decades. Luckily, the Knesset suspended its consideration of the Bill, but the Israeli Prime Minister’s role in having it stopped is noteworthy. He stepped in, as The Jerusalem Post reported: “Netanyahu became involved after it became clear that the closure of the church had the potential to cause Israel considerable diplomatic damage”. Our Government should take heed. Diplomacy can work, and Her Majesty’s Government should not be afraid to protest or condemn, even when our close friends are involved. Let me deal with one aspect of the persecution of Christians.”
“I agree that there is persecution in too many parts of the world, and all persecution is terrible, but the people whose lives are made a complete and utter misery and who are overtly oppressed are overwhelmingly either Christians or members of minority Muslim groups. We are going to stand up one by one and attack various Governments for persecuting people, so let me start with a good news story from Israel. Recently, the Israeli Parliament considered a private Member’s Bill that would have granted expansive powers to confiscate church property in Jerusalem. Astonishingly, it would have allowed the municipality to confiscate even properties that had previously been sold by church bodies. Such ex post facto laws are almost unheard of in Israeli jurisprudence. Indeed, traditionally, Christian communities have been protected in Israel.”
“The situation with the underground Church in China is unbelievably complex, but there is no question of the Catholic Church deserting those brave people. We hope some sort of compromise or consensus can be achieved with the Chinese Government. The honest truth is that the people who are persecuted in the world are overwhelmingly either Christians or members of minority Muslim communities who are persecuted by majority Muslim communities. There are of course very bad examples of discrimination by Christians, but I hope that the Minister will not use the usual rather easy Foreign Office line that there is persecution everywhere in the world.”
“I agree that there are examples of politically correct magistrates and police officers being over-zealous in dealing with Bible preachers, and everything she said was right, but to equate that with a criminal regime in Iran that hangs and persecutes people and treats minorities with complete contempt is ridiculous. When we speak out, we should attack the really evil regimes around the world. There are forces for good that are trying to resolve difficult cases. I say to the hon. Member for West Dunbartonshire (Martin Docherty-Hughes) that the papal nuncio has visited Parliament. We have been talking to him and to our ambassador to the Holy See in the past week, and the all-party group on the Holy See is going to the Vatican.”
“We should congratulate the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) on how he introduced the debate and his work over many years to highlight these issues. I have joined him in many debates over the years. As usual, he spoke up in a powerful and noble way. I am grateful to all those who spoke before me, and I adopt all their points. I do not disagree with anything anyone said. The hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh) rightly described the persecution of Ahmadi Muslims. I was astonished by the reaction of the Iranian parliamentary delegation to this country that my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) mentioned.”
“This is the first proper departmental estimates debate, thanks to the Procedure Committee and the Backbench Business Committee. In our 2012 report to the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, “Options to Improve Parliamentary Scrutiny of Government Expenditure”, Dr John Pugh, who was then a Member of Parliament, and I included a recommendation to introduce additional estimates days on subjects to be suggested by a budget committee that we also proposed to create. Dr Pugh decided to test this matter by trying to talk on the subject of estimates on estimates days. He was ruled out of order by your Deputy Speaker, Mr Speaker, despite speaking about estimates on estimates days. The reason we are here today is thanks to the work of the Procedure Committee, which I had the privilege of serving on in the previous Parliament.”
“Debates such as this one will, I hope, encourage broader participation of Members of this House in the formal budgetary process. We have a range of experience and points of view. I hope that this use of the debate to look at the Ministry of Defence estimates might also encourage us to have a more substantial debate on defence in general. When I saw that at last we were going to get this estimates day debate, I approached my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis), the Chair of the Defence Committee, because I thought there was no better subject than defence to lead off on in discussing Government spending on an estimates day. That is why we are here, and this is a real opportunity. I will now talk a little bit about defence, although I recognise that there are people who are far more expert than me in this Chamber.”
“For instance, in several other countries with public financial management systems that are based on the British system, estimates include spending information at a programme level, with past spending information for each programme and medium-term estimates of the cost of the programme covering the Budget year and at least two further years. Good estimates help us to understand the link between Government priorities, desired impacts and the contribution of programmes to them. There is still a lot of work to do. I would have thought that parliamentary scrutiny of the Budget was at the very heart of this body’s raison d’être. We have fought wars on this very subject yet are not particularly bothered by the comparatively little scrutiny we have of Government spending.”
“As long ago as 1999, the Procedure Committee said that “when motions are directed to future plans, motions recommending that ‘in the opinion of the House’ increases in expenditure or transfers between certain budgets are desirable, should be permissible.” I believe that Select Committees should have stronger powers to investigate and scrutinise public spending. In Australia, Select Committees also sit as estimates committees, with Ministers and departmental body heads appearing before MPs or Senators to justify their spending. In other Commonwealth countries, quite a lot of work has been done on this.”
“However, given that the Government intend this parliamentary Session to last for two years, the already insufficient allocation of days for estimates days is doubly inadequate. Overall, in the past 100 years the House of Commons has delegated its role to the Treasury. We in this Chamber should be doing more. Why should we leave it just to unelected civil servants to debate what we spend and how we allocate spending among Government Departments? This House is asked to approve Executive spending even though we are not given much clarity about what that spending is expected to deliver, nor indeed the means to influence spending levels or priorities.”
“Another report, in 1981, said: “By 1966 there was a considerable discrepancy between the theory of supply procedure, under which individual estimates were put down for detailed consideration at regular intervals, and the practice, under which supply days were used by the opposition to discuss topics of their choice”, which often had little, if anything, to do with the votes concerned. Indeed, the Clerk Assistant told the House that by the 1960s more and more supply day procedures had gone through which were “Little short of farcical”. I am glad that thanks to the Procedure Committee, and all the work that has been done and the debates that we have had, we are now going to talk about money.”
“We have one of the weakest systems in the world in terms of parliamentary scrutiny of what we are planning to spend, not of what we have spent. Estimates days, as they have existed, have borne little relation to the actual content of the departmental estimates. Let me give a little bit of history, which is always interesting. This debate has gone on for quite a long time. In 1911, the then Clerk of the House, Sir Courtenay Ilbert, said: “The sittings of the committee of supply continue through the greater part of the session, and, under existing standing orders, at least twenty days must be set apart for this purpose” . Already, estimates days were just being used as a kind of general critique of government rather than actually to deal with what we were going to spend.”
“I put it to the Procedure Committee, and it recommended to the Backbench Business Committee, that we take on the role of determining estimates to be debated on estimates days. Scrutiny of the Government’s supply estimates was listed under “unfinished business” at the end of the previous Parliament. It is thanks to the current Committee and its Chairman, my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne (Mr Walker), that this business is no longer unfinished and we have now decided to debate estimates on estimates days. It is quite shocking how little power or influence the House of Commons has over spending in the estimates procedure, with a budget of some £800 billion a year. We have one of the best post-hoc systems in the world, through the Public Accounts Committee.”
“Well, I think it is very nice that we have such an impressive Minister as the Under-Secretary of State for Defence, my right hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood), sitting in front of us.”
“I am grateful for that. Given our commitment to spend 2% of GDP on defence, as is required of NATO members, which most NATO countries ignore, we will have to spend more on defence regardless, in order to keep with up that target. That is the challenge we face.”
“That is an extremely good point, and if I have time I will deal with amphibious capacity later in my speech. This is a real challenge. As Professor Malcolm Chalmers, deputy director-general of the Royal United Services Institute, pointed out in his evidence to the Defence Committee: “While the MoD budget is set to grow by 0.5 per cent per annum over the next five years, national income (GDP) is projected to grow by an average of 2.4 per cent per annum over the same period.” That means that the current Government commitments to defence spending imply that UK defence expenditure will fall from 2.8% of GDP in 2015-16 to 1.85% in 2020-21. I believe that Ministers need to come clean and make it clear whether they intend to abandon the 2% commitment, as seems to be the case.”
“This requires the MOD to generate £5.8 billion of new savings from within the defence equipment plan itself, in addition to £1.5 billion from the wider defence budget, which is already under pressure. We never of course know what crisis may happen, and if a crisis happens and our troops have to be deployed, where will the money come from? In such a case, will we end up taking money from procurement that we had not expected to take?”
“Professor Julian Lindley French testified, again to the Defence Committee: “If you look at the $90 billion being spent by the Russians as part of their modernisation programme, the $150 billion or so being spent by the Chinese and what other countries around the world are doing, what strikes me is how few assets—both platforms and systems—the UK gets for its money.” As a former Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, I am talking not just about more money for the MOD, but about spending the money more wisely. The MOD committed itself to new purchases arising from its 2015 strategic defence and security review before it established how they could be paid for.”
“That is an extremely good point, and I will come on to deal with the people side. As the Defence Committee has pointed out, there appear to be some shenanigans going on in relation to how we reach the 2% target, and this is a really good opportunity for us to discuss money in detail and for the Minister to reply to these points. The criteria seem to change from year to year, with new bits—war pensions and other expenditure—qualifying when they have not previously done so. NATO is apparently satisfied, but this rather gives the impression that we are meeting our targets only by means of creative accounting, and when it comes to the defence of the realm, surely creative accounting is not good enough. Let me say a word about procurement. What are our procurement procedures, and are we getting value for money?”
“That point on purchasing power is a very pertinent one. I hope that the Minister replies to it, because it is a point well made. Uncertainties and over-optimism—there is over-optimism—in the project costs mean that the final costs of the defence equipment plan may be significantly understated. The MOD’s cost assurance and analysis service reported that the costs in the 2016 plan were understated by £4.8 billion. Over a period of years, the MOD has failed to agree a workable way forward with the prime contractor on the procurement of a Type 26 warship, which has compromised maritime capability and placed further upward pressure on costs.”
“The Bundeswehr was due to take over the rotating lead of NATO’s Very High Readiness Joint Task Force, but despite committing 44 Leopard 2 battle tanks to the force, it was revealed that only nine are operational. It begins to look as though the arrangements for the conventional defence of Europe are a bit of a shambles. The reality is that we are underspending, just as we did in the lead-up to the second world war. Back then, we were capable of jump-starting and expanding our defence capabilities because we faced an existential threat. God willing, we will not face that kind of threat in the coming years, though we can never rule out the possibility.”
“The NAO continues: “Unless the Department takes urgent action to close the gap in affordability, it will find that spending on equipment can only be made affordable by reducing the scope of projects”. We have had training exercises cancelled, and we know that soldiers, sailors and airmen need to keep active so that they are fully trained and at the ready. Cancelling training exercises is short-sighted and a false economy. Just to be fair for a moment to the MOD and the pressures it is facing, we are not the only ones having problems. Documents linked to Die Welt newspaper show that the German military has secretly admitted that it cannot fulfil its NATO obligations.”
“That is a good point. Again, I hope the Minister replies to it. It may be a case of when times change, procurement policies change, but will that result in more pressure? What I am saying—several Members, particularly my hon. Friend, have made this point in their interventions—is that the defence equipment plan has no leeway to cope with new equipment requirements resulting from emerging threats. As the National Audit Office’s investigation of the plan put it: “The Department’s Equipment Plan is not affordable. It does not provide a realistic forecast of the costs of buying and supporting the equipment that the Armed Forces will need over the next 10 years.” If it does not do so, what is it for?”
“There is no point in our having a token commitment to or presence in the Baltic states; we need a real presence if deterrence is to work. Many other threats are developing from Russia, the Chinese and other potential opponents: cyber-attacks and information warfare are all potential threats.”
“What have we been talking about for the past hour except Russia? According to some estimates, its economy’s GDP is equivalent to that of Italy or even that of Australia. Russia’s emphasis on its defence spending has made it an extremely important geopolitical player. Although we are constantly told that times have changed and that defence spending is not as important as it was, perhaps the Russian example shows that defence spending does pay off. I am not for one moment defending or approving of Russia or anything it does, but it has drawn the obvious lessons from the 1990s. There is a threat from Russia and we need to take it seriously. Surely one lesson we can draw from the past, particularly from the lead-up to the second world war, is that, in terms of commitments, we must have a real presence.”
“That is a very good point. With France, and after America, we are the leading military power in Europe and we have to set an example. If we withdraw from exercises, that creates a bad impression. I am glad to see that the hon. Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker) is here. He introduced his Backbench Business debate on defence last month and pointed out that the risks this country faces are only intensifying. If we face a multiplicity and variety of threats, surely our capabilities must reflect that. Russia is indeed a threat again, because it realised that the only way to be taken seriously is to be seen to be a threat. We treated Russia with contempt during the 1990s and it has drawn the lesson. It is a geopolitical gamble that we may not approve of, but in terms of Russian influence it has paid off.”
“The Royal Navy has to be the most important service for an outwardly facing island nation.” I agree with that. In December 2017, all six of our Type 45 destroyers were laid up in Portsmouth, whether for repairs, equipment failures, routine maintenance or manpower shortages. The possibility of a significant crisis requiring a naval deployment catching us not ready is strong—too strong.”
“Meanwhile, there are proposals to cut the Royal Marines, some of our most useful, well-trained, high-quality and greatly effective troops. The variety of roles they can undertake underpins the ability of Great Britain to project our military power. As I will mention in a moment, this has led to low morale and a culture of fear for the future in one of the most important and valuable parts of our military. Then there is the Navy. I received an email—one of many that have been sent to many Members from all sorts of sources—from a former Army major, writing to me through “gritted teeth”: “the area of defence that has been shockingly neglected is the Royal Navy. Put Trident to one side and disregard the vanity project that is HMS Queen Elizabeth and you have virtually no ships.”
“Ministers have so far refused to commit to keeping HMS Albion and HMS Bulwark, which give our armed forces an amphibious landing capability, as the hon. Member for Torfaen (Nick Thomas-Symonds) said in an earlier intervention. The hon. Member for Barnsley Central (Dan Jarvis) pointed out last month that “40% of the world’s population live within 100 km of the coast”. —[ Official Report , 11 January 2018; Vol. 634, c. 516.] I voted against the Iraq war, but the fact remains that we made a very effective contribution with our amphibious invasion of the al-Faw peninsula in 2003. I may not always be in favour of using military options, but I want, and the British people demand, that we have as many options on the table as we can and that we maintain our capabilities.”
“Yes, I certainly think it should reconsider it. All the old, conventional threats are still very real and require conventional responses. We have to maintain our original capabilities while also expanding and improving them. On the range of capabilities, last year Hurricane Irma wreaked devastation in the Caribbean, and HMS Ocean was a key element in our response to that tragedy. Now, apparently we have sold HMS Ocean to the Brazilians, but we have a proud humanitarian tradition on these islands and it is our duty to maintain it. This is not just about responding to threats; it is also about our humanitarian duty. We have direct responsibility for our overseas territories and bonds of close friendship with other members of the Commonwealth.”
“All the same, we still need a Regular Army, but we are not meeting targets for that either. Our force strength numbers are not up to scratch. In April 2016, we were short by 5,750 personnel. A year later, that had increased to over 6,000. By August 2017, it was over 7,000 and the latest statistics available show our armed forces are short of their full strength by 8,160 men. The problem is getting worse.”
“That is a very good point and that was a worrying incident. On recruitment and numbers, the Public Accounts Committee “Army 2020” report notes that “the Army’s recruiting partner, Capita, missed its regular soldier recruitment target by 30% in 2013-14 and it recruited only around 2,000 reserves against a target of 6,000. A huge step-up in performance is required if the Army is to hit its ambitious target of recruiting 9,270 new reserves in 2016-17. The size of the regular Army is reducing faster than originally planned but the size of the trained Army reserve has not increased in the last two years because more people have left the reserve than joined.” We have shifted from an emphasis on the Regular Army to one that includes a very strong Army reserve.”
“There is clearly a problem, one I hope the Minister will deal with later. Why does it take so long to recruit? Are we putting off potential recruits with our very slow processes?”
“My right hon. Friend is of course a former Minister for the Armed Forces and really does know what he is talking about. The Government should listen to him. There is a problem with morale. Those who perceive service morale as low increased by 12% on the previous year in the Army and 15% in the Royal Marines in 2017. The overwhelming majority, 74%, feel proud to serve—we are proud of them for feeling proud to serve—but only a third feel valued by their service. What is the point of training men and women if we fail to keep them?”
“He said these words: “It takes three years to build a ship, but it takes three centuries to build a tradition. The evacuation will continue.” Our traditions of a great nation and great armed forces must continue. That is why this important debate must continue, too.”