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Foreign Affairs and Defence

I am grateful to the shadow Foreign Secretary. To go back to the point about DFID, I should say that, yes, on both sides of the House we pay tribute to the great work that it does across the world, but it has taken a long time to catch up with its new responsibility, which was never part of its original remit, to support our military in difficult environments. That is our complaint on this side of the House. Yes, things are better in Afghanistan now, but it has taken five years for that to happen. We are testing the nation's patience on how long we can stay there, because reconstruction and development have taken so long.