HE Mr Derek Leask, High Commissioner of New Zealand, delivered a speech to the Conservative Foreign and Commonwealth Council in central London this evening.
At a time when we should be forging new alliances with the powers that will affect our destiny, when we should be vigorously promoting new and more flexible structures for the EU, when we should be building up the Commonwealth as the ideal soft power network of the future, at a time when we should be massively modernising our security forces to meet asymmetric threats, when we should be reconstructing and upgrading our whole diplomatic system, we are doing none of those things.
Lord Blaker, who died on July 5 aged 86, became first a diplomat and then a long-serving Conservative MP who twice returned to the Foreign Office as a minister; he also served at the Ministry of Defence.
Housing production in Africa has not kept pace with population and job growth in either quantity or location. With demand for housing greatly outpacing supply, prices have skyrocketed.
The British military is overstretched, undermanned and suffering from a decade of neglect by the current Labour Government. We have a Treasury which is heavily influencing how the campaign is conducted in Helmand and we have a procurement programme that for all intents and purposes has failed. The top 19 major procurement projects have gone over budget by a total of £2.95bn and are cumulatively 429 months delayed.
Philippa Broom is Director at the International Office for the Conservative Party and is also Director of the Westminster Foundation for Democracy Programme. She travels widely on party political democracy development work and has recently specifically focussed on the Maldives.
Ambassador I.Berziņš introduced members of the Conservative Foreign and Commonwealth Council with a short history of Latvia’s road of regaining independence. He highlighted Latvia’s successful bid to join NATO and the EU.
