Wes Streeting

There’s rarely been a more important time for Britain and America to come together.

Where industry tells us that there is pointless regulation getting in the way, where our armed forces frankly tell us there’s regulatory handcuffs getting in their way – and we agree with them that they are pointless and not serving their…

I applaud his ingenuity and drive for innovation and entrepreneurial spirit, but there should be the same can-do approach in his workplace.

I met one Royal Marine who was developing underwater drone technology but testing it in a pond in his back garden because the regulatory hurdles to test in other environments were too high.

You can understand why, in a defence context, you don’t just take off all of the regulatory oversight and constraints because we are talking about lethal capability.

We stand with President Zelensky.

I think there is clearly more to do, as evidenced by what we saw last night.

That’s not what we’re looking at, at this stage.

Let’s be candid about this: midterms are coming up, cost of living is an issue. No doubt President Trump is feeling the same pressure that lots of leaders are facing in terms of wanting to ease cost of living pressures, energy prices.

We are in no doubt that the aggressor here was Vladimir Putin. He is the person who chose to start this war. He is the person who could end this war tomorrow, and he chooses not to. So, we stand with Ukraine. We stand with President…

Strength is the best form of deterrence.

I do want to say that our friendship with America is the closest alliance of any two nations on earth, and we will always stand together against those who hate our freedom and those who wish us harm.

I also want to state personally my enormous thanks to our police, our counter-terrorism police, emergency services and the security services for their hard work to defend our base at RAF Fairford.

We are grateful for the vigilance of the members of the public.

In the dangerous and turbulent world we find ourselves in, investment in defence is a price worth paying.

As and when we can, we will report back to the public about these individuals and about the nature of the threat.

We can be reassured that this is being dealt with.

This world-first access to real battlefield data will allow British companies to continue pushing the frontier of defence innovation, deterring our enemies and making us safer at home as well as further strengthening Ukraine.

Things are moving at warp speed. We have to be ready for space at the next battleground, and we are.

More importantly, we would be wrong to prepare only to fight a current war.

We cannot afford to make the cliched mistake of fighting the last war.

It is difficult and necessarily painstaking work, but it is necessary.

Yes, we have to, because the US doesn’t support it.

This is, I think, probably I’d describe it as the latest iteration of what has been a long-running space race.