Adam Holloway: I categorically did not refer to British cowardice in Operation Charge of the Knights—on the contrary, the absolute reverse—on the part of our military transition teams. All I said was that Britain's involvement, in terms of our command chain, was late. That is all I said.
Adam Holloway: We are in danger of becoming dewy-eyed over the debacle in Iraq. In this century, we have never had a serious strategy for dealing with Iraq. That was the case as we went into the war and after the war, and I fear that it is also the case today. The decision to offer UK support to the US invasion was made by the Prime Minister, pretty much alone, in Crawford, Texas in April 2002. The only...
Adam Holloway: It is tragic. I was in Iraq in the first war as a soldier and in the second war as a television correspondent. I shall never forget being in Kirkuk as the Iraqi Government were falling. Very few European people were around, and I was literally mobbed. This guy who was in the process of looting two incubators from the hospital came up and hugged me because people were so happy and they wanted...
Adam Holloway: Does the Secretary of State not accept that when we made the accommodation and went back to the airport, we did not hand Basra over to the Iraqi Government or the Iraqi army? We handed it over to the Jaish al-Mahdi militia.
Adam Holloway: The tax money will have to come from somewhere if the toll is taken away. Obviously I would like that to happen, but my main concern is the crazy operations management. Why should people from Gravesham or any of the other constituencies represented in the debate have to spend minutes, or large proportions of an hour, waiting? I would say that in the three years that I have been the Member for...
Adam Holloway: What recent estimate she has made of the proportion of time police officers spend on the beat.
Adam Holloway: What does the Minister think the Government's Green Paper means when it says that the target culture in the police has created a perverse incentive that is distorting police action?
Adam Holloway: In an earlier answer, the Minister for Security, Counter-Terrorism, Crime and Policing said that local people's confidence in the police was a key indicator, so can he tell me why people are increasingly not bothering to report crimes to the police?
Adam Holloway: The Government claim to have virtually eradicated long-term unemployment, and indeed it is pretty hard statistically to classify it as such nowadays. However, plenty of my constituents are long-term unemployed, and in some cases the unemployment has lasted for generations. Do the Government really think that those people can be hidden away in numbers?
Adam Holloway: What recent discussions he has had with Ofcom on the public service obligations of the broadcast media.
Adam Holloway: But apart from that, is there anything that the Minister can actually do to stop the slide into tabloid television at the BBC? For example, what could be done to reinforce the excellent and totally unbiased coverage by my sometime employer, BBC news and current affairs?
Adam Holloway: Whether he plans to conduct a strategic defence review.
Adam Holloway: Does the Minister accept that there have been significant changes to the threats facing this country since 1998 and 2002? What are the threats, and what is he doing about meeting them?
Adam Holloway: I have been so impressed by the brevity of some of the speeches I have heard today that it has rendered me almost unable to speak. Members will be relieved to hear, therefore, that I am going to throw away the speech that I had prepared and will just make a couple of points. We need to consider having some sort of defence policy, and I would have spoken about this at much greater length if my...
Adam Holloway: I shall be brief, and not inflict my dreadful voice on everyone for too long. Clearly, we will win this only with a political settlement. People have spoken about increasing the capacity of the Afghan national army. That is probably a much more important way forward than increasing the number of foreign troops, apart from those with niche capabilities. We are always told that it is hard to...
Adam Holloway: Is the hon. Gentleman's difficulty that we got rid of the Taliban, or that we messed things up in the seven years since—or both?
Adam Holloway: Is the £350 million that has been announced to help to train staff in small and medium-sized enterprises new money or warmed-up old money?
Adam Holloway: What recent assessment she has made of the effectiveness of measures to combat alcohol-induced crime.
Adam Holloway: What difference do these measures make if so-called low-level antisocial behaviour, including children drinking, is often now under the police radar?
Adam Holloway: What recent assessment he has made of the progress of the Sure Start programme.