Speeches by Martin.

“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?”

“That is fine until you have a security crisis and then your military is exposed. Mr Heappey is nodding, again—for the benefit of Hansard. You have a white tie there—”

“And you get shown up. Exactly.”

“Yes.”

“How do you crack that open?”

“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Allin-Khan. I would like to start by thanking the Minister for all her support. I do not think we realised that we would spend so much time on the same Zoom calls with a vast collection of characters from across Kent and the water sector. I also thank the Secretary of …”

“And fixes our forces in Ukraine.”

“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…”

“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?”

“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…”

“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?”

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

“You are quite happy that Russia is fixed in Ukraine; you are almost saying that that is a good thing, and I agree with you that it is a good thing. But if it is a good thing that Russia is fixed in Ukraine, how is it not a bad thing that we become fixed in Ukraine if we deploy troops there?”

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

“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…”

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