Speeches by Martin.

“If I get made the Chancellor, that is going to be a real turnaround for the Labour party—but I look forward to it.”

“A former Deputy Prime Minister of the UK described to me the MoD’s approach to information security as “Stalinist”. Do you agree with that characterisation—as we have been discussing—and why do you think that is?”

“Absolutely retentive and close hold, and nothing shared whatsoever. You have just been describing it.”

“And you get shown up. Exactly.”

“Yes.”

“Trump is certainly an unreliable and unpredictable ally, and his comments yesterday about the Norwegian leadership make us all wonder whether he is of sound mind, but what can we do? We have to deal with him. I am sure it has not escaped the Foreign Secretary’s notice that the messaging from Congress is quite different…”

“But would you say that it is letting the side down not to have one, in terms of our allies and partners?”

“Sorry, but where is the risk if we put 20,000 troops into Ukraine?”

“Thank you, Chair, and thank you for coming, Air Chief Marshal. I want to pick up the theme that Jesse Norman and Tan have spoken about. The family of plans is asking for more, there are higher requirements from NATO, and we are talking about more deployments, about the coalition of the willing in Ukraine and perhaps ab…”

“Are you aware of any other NATO countries that do not have national defence plans?”

“We are mandated to have that plan, right? We have signed a treaty that says we will.”

“When are we going to have the plan?”

“Why do we not have one yet?”

“The Government’s figures were pretty shoddy when the policy was announced at the Budget. How confident is the shadow Minister that the Government’s figures are any better now?”

“I thank the Minister for all the help she has given me and my constituents over the past month. Tunbridge Wells is yet again without water. We seem to roll from outage to outage. As we stand here today, 6,500 houses are without supply. Schools are closed, and even more are closing as more areas go out of supply. The Mi…”

“Shouldn’t we?”

“You are right: it is absolutely about asking, “Is that bridge built to do X under duress?” A mindset shift is needed as well. I am an MP for a constituency that has suffered repeated water outages, including for two weeks before Christmas. Towards the end of that outage, bad actors were playing in the social media spac…”

“A final question: how many soldiers does the Russian Federation have in Ukraine?”

“I will touch on homeland preparedness and resilience. You will know very well that NATO article 3 mandates that we should continuously and effectively “maintain and develop” our “individual and collective capacity to resist armed attack.” That speaks specifically to this question of national resilience, both in a milit…”

“What is a safe number?”