G8 and G20 Summits

Paul Flynn Excerpts

Monday 28th June 2010 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

My hon. Friend is right. We are trying to put in place a system whereby banks have to ask themselves whether they have enough capital to withstand the sort of shock they suffered in 2008 and 2009. That is what needs to take place, and it is being put in place relatively quickly, but the rules need to be drawn up and agreed, and there may then be a pause before they are actually introduced, because at the moment the great risk is shrinkage of the monetary base—a shrinkage of bank lending—at this very sensitive time in our recovery.

[Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)]

How can the Prime Minister retain his optimism after 11 British deaths in 10 days? How can a stable Afghanistan be built on the crumbling foundations of an election-rigging president and his criminal family, on an Afghan army that is mercenary and drug-addicted and on a police force that is depraved and entirely corrupt? We are in the end game position, as Canada and the Netherlands have explained. At the end of the Vietnam war a question was asked that should haunt us all now: who will be the last soldier ordered into battle to die for a politician’s mistake?

[The Prime Minister]

The hon. Gentleman has long taken that view, but even though he makes that case he wildly overstates it. If we talk to British soldiers who serve with the Afghan national army they say that those soldiers are brave, they work hard and they are committed. Yes, of course we need to improve recruitment from all parts of the country, but I do not think it is fair to characterise the army as he does. There have been problems with the Afghan police force, but when we go to Afghanistan we see police trainers from European and American countries doing good work. I do not accept that all is as bleak as the hon. Gentleman puts it. We have had a number of casualties, which are heartbreaking in every individual case and it is heartbreaking that there are so many, but we have to remember what we are doing in Afghanistan. It is not creating the perfect society; it is training up the Afghans so that they can take care of their own security and we face fewer attacks from terrorist groups trained in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area. The hon. Gentleman shakes his head, but the fact is that today the number of threats coming from that area is reduced, because of what we have done in Afghanistan and because of what the Pakistan Government are doing in Pakistan. Of course we should not be blind to people’s concerns, but we should try to take people with us on the success there has been in reducing those threats.