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Defence in the UK

I am just trying to point, Madam Deputy Speaker, to what I consider to be a form of sophistry, an endemic spin culture that has infected officials and senior officers to become a default setting—that all is well when things are not. As I see it, the challenge for this country over the next one, five, 20 or 50 years, is to get ourselves back to the situation we were in on 12 September 2001, when the vast majority of people in the Arab and Muslim worlds were deeply sympathetic to us. Since that time, we have created a ““stickiness? with those tens of millions of people, and pushed them more towards the extremists, whom the vast majority previously wanted nothing to do with. It is time that we had a long-term strategy to deal with that problem, which will affect us all. The good-news-only culture obscures problems and increases the likelihood of a second strategic failure, this time in Afghanistan, which will be reflected on Arab television screens. In terms of terrorism, that will not contribute to the defence of the UK. Every day, we are deluding ourselves.