Mark Francois MP: speeches

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Speeches

12 Nov 2025 · Typhoon Fighter Sovereign Capability · Hansard source
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My hon. Friend is making a good speech. I recently paid a shadow ministerial visit to Warton and Samlesbury, and we saw the penultimate Qatari Typhoon painted and ready to fly out, I think within a couple of days. The last one may even have gone now as well. To emphasise his point, this is extremely pressing, is it not?
12 Nov 2025 · Typhoon Fighter Sovereign Capability · Hansard source
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Where are the SNP?
11 Nov 2025 · Remembrance Day: Armed Forces · Hansard source
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As a young person myself, having recently turned 60— [Laughter . ] In all seriousness, at the remembrances services that I attended this weekend—like, I am sure, many Members on both sides of the House—I was struck by the number of young people from, for instance, the Cubs, the Scouts and the Brownies who attended those services and, in many cases, participated, and laid tributes, wreaths and crosses of their own. I took great heart from that, and I believe that there is hope yet. There would be no greater betrayal of the sacrifices that we have been debating this evening than would occur if we as a House, with all the other matters that we have to consider, somehow became so distracted or complacent that we failed to act with sufficient clarity of purpose and determination to deter a future major conflict, perhaps even a global one, from breaking out again in our lifetimes. To put it, perhaps, in another way, we must now conduct ourselves, in “our today”, in such a way as never to risk the security of “our tomorrow”. With that sincere warning, I pay tribute to our valiant armed forces, both past and present, and to everything that they do, day in and day out, to keep us and our country safe and free—lest we forget.
11 Nov 2025 · Remembrance Day: Armed Forces · Hansard source
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Can my right hon. Friend confirm for the parliamentary record that of the nine generals who have written this unprecedented letter, three formerly served as Chief of the General Staff—in other words, the professional head of the British Army?
11 Nov 2025 · Remembrance Day: Armed Forces · Hansard source
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It is a privilege to open this debate for His Majesty’s Opposition on 11 November, Armistice Day—a date on which the nation pauses and gives thanks for the sacrifice of our armed forces so that we can live in a free country. It is a pleasure to follow the Minister for the Armed Forces, and I endorse his comments about the value of our armed forces and the vital role they play in the nation’s contribution to remembrance. We all thank them for their service. The Minister rightly paid tribute to the operational role of our armed forces, which remain as vigilant as ever around the clock to keep us safe in the 21st century. Nevertheless, perhaps he will forgive me if in my contribution I too take something of a historical perspective on the vital role that our armed forces have played in the defence of our nation down the years. I was privileged to attend the Royal British Legion festival of remembrance last Saturday evening, which remains as moving an occasion as when I first attended as an MOD Minister over a decade ago. I pay tribute to the extremely valuable role that the Royal British Legion plays in both shaping our whole concept of remembrance and in supporting our veterans, some 2 million or so of whom are still living today. As well as the national commemorations, including those at the Cenotaph, the Royal British Legion, often supported by local armed forces personnel, plays a vital role in organising services at a community level in all our constituencies, up and down the length and breadth of the United Kingdom. In my experience, every community tends to do remembrance slightly differently to account for local circumstances, but each ceremony has common elements with which we are all familiar: the emotive playing of the “Last Post”, the two-minute silence and, usually, the famous epitaph from the 2nd Infantry Division memorial—universally known as the Kohima epitaph—with those famous and stirring words: “When you go home, tell them of us and say, For your tomorrow, we gave our today.” The battle of Kohima, brilliantly described in Field Marshal the Viscount Slim’s 1956 book, “Defeat into Victory”—arguably one of the best books ever written on the whole concept of generalship—was a classic example of a dogged defence by British and, crucially, Commonwealth forces in stopping the attempted Japanese advance into India in mid-1944. Indeed, the dogged, stubborn defence—often against superior odds—is a recurrent feature of British military tradition: including the English archers at Agincourt; the great siege of Gibraltar; Wellington’s army at Waterloo; the 24th Foot at Rorke’s Drift, which saw 11 Victoria Crosses awarded, the most ever awarded in a single action; “the few” of Fighter Command in the battle of Britain, to whom the Minister also referred; the Royal Navy escorting the Atlantic convoys; the Glorious Glosters at the Imjin river in Korea; and many more besides, including more recently in the middle east. There are, of course, many comparable examples from the first world war, not least the stand of the British Expeditionary Force at Mons and the subsequent first battle of Ypres. Anyone who has stood at the Menin Gate when the buglers of the Ypres fire brigade play the “Last Post”, as it swirls around that famous arch, knows that it is a truly moving and emotive ceremony to behold.
11 Nov 2025 · Remembrance Day: Armed Forces · Hansard source
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I completely agree with my right hon. and gallant Friend—the history of the 14th Army is a proud one. It was a marvellous amalgam, under a brilliant leader, of people from countries and races from around the entire Commonwealth who fought with one common aim: freedom. They were sometimes called the forgotten army, but they are not forgotten tonight. After the horrors of the trenches and an understandable aversion to war in the 1920s, with Britain exhausted—both financially and emotionally—by the horrors of the great war, the Government of the day introduced what came to be known as the 10-year rule. This was not just the policy of the War Office or the Admiralty, as they then were; it was a pan-Whitehall edict, the essence of which was that Britain would not have to fight another major war for at least 10 years. This key planning assumption became the centrepiece of British strategic theory and, with strong endorsement from the Treasury, the 10-year rule soon became a rolling one, extended on an annual basis. Given that no war was expected for at least a decade, this allowed for major economies in the financing of the armed forces and an associated running-down of all three services. As one example of how seriously the 10-year rule was taken and implemented, even Winston Churchill during his time as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1920s exerted pressure to cut back on his beloved Royal Navy—the same service he had fought tenaciously to expand as First Lord of the Admiralty barely a decade before. Indeed, as a mood of pacifism gripped the nation, in 1933—the same year in which Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany—the earnest students of the Oxford Union, who are having their own problems at the moment, passed a motion by a majority of over two to one that “this House will under no circumstances fight for its King and country”. The subsequent policy of appeasement from the 1930s British establishment—the blob of their day—was as erroneous then as it would be today. Authoritarian dictators tend to admire strength, particularly their own, and despise weakness—a lesson that any British Government, including this one, would do well to remember. History tells us again and again that the appeasement of dictators does not work, just as it failed to work in the 1930s The 10-year rule, which by that stage had lasted well over a decade, was eventually rescinded in 1935-36 as Britain began to rearm in response to Hitler’s increasingly bellicose behaviour. Nevertheless, that rearmament, and comparable action by our allies, was ultimately insufficient to deter what then became the second world war—a brutal conflict in which over 50 million people died, far more even than had perished in the supposed war to end all wars some two decades before. I mention all this not just because I studied history and then military history at university, but because if—as Members of this House believe, and as I have always believed—the ultimate goal of our armed forces is to save lives by deterring war and persuading any potential aggressor that they could not prevail, then even today we all need to ask ourselves, regardless of party, whether we are doing enough to secure the peace by maintaining sufficiently strong armed forces to provide such a vital deterrent effect. It is a historical fact that twice in the last century, this country paid an immense cost in both blood and treasure to defeat militarism. Today, the threats are somewhat different, with a war on our doorstep in Europe following Russia’s barbaric and illegal invasion of Ukraine. The Ukrainians are in effect now fighting for our freedom too, and we must back them to the hilt as a result. We also see a major rearmament by China; North Korea continues to develop even longer-range intercontinental ballistic missiles, now with support from Russia; and Iran continues to exert malign influence across the middle east, even after the successful American strike on its emerging nuclear capabilities. The circumstances may have changed, but the principle remains exactly the same. We in the western democracies cannot drop our guard against the growing powers of the 21st-century autocracies—something that those who fought in the second world war would instinctively understand only too well. Bearing in mind the Minister’s caution, I was genuinely concerned to read one passage of the Government’s recent strategic defence review—its seminal defence policy document. On page 43, under the heading “Transforming UK Warfighting”, it states: “This Review charts a new era for Defence, restoring the UK’s ability to deter, fight, and win—with allies—against states with advanced military forces by 2035.” I say to the Minister in all sincerity that that seems to contain an echo of the 10-year rule of the 1920s. While there was a great deal of good in the SDR, not least the intention to speed up our highly bureaucratic procurement system—about which I have always held firm views, as the Minister knows—I nevertheless worry, given increasing threats from Russia and now also from China, about whether the Ministry of Defence today displays the genuine sense of urgency that is required to meet the challenges we now all clearly face. Before I am accused of selective quoting, the same paragraph of the SDR goes on to say: “This vision could be achieved more quickly should circumstances demand it and should more resources be made available.” Notwithstanding those words, with much of the new money in the SDR unavailable for at least two years and a multibillion-pound programme of in-year efficiency savings now under way, I merely ask whether we have really learned the lessons of the past century as well as we might have. In conclusion, we in these islands have always ultimately been prepared to make great sacrifices to uphold the freedom of Europe, and indeed of the wider world. That is why, given our history, we should never forget that the first duty of Government remains the defence of the realm. In response to the philosopher Edmund Burke’s famous challenge that all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing, twice in the past century our own good men and women across the nation stood up to and defeated such evil, with our armed forces in the lead. Rightfully, we solemnly remember that sacrifice each and every November, including in this House tonight.
3 Nov 2025 · “Soldier F” Trial Verdict · Hansard source
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Conditional immunity.
3 Nov 2025 · Army Recruitment · Hansard source
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The former Labour Security Minister Lord West said recently that we “shouldn’t be doing” this. Lord Glasman, the founder of Blue Labour, said: “We must reverse it as soon as possible.” The hon. Member for Blackley and Middleton South (Graham Stringer) said that “to continue this against one side makes no sense.” With a Labour rebellion clearly brewing, and given that many Northern Ireland veterans were initially recruited from red wall seats, why are Labour Ministers insisting on driving their Back Benchers into the Division Lobby just to do Sinn Féin and their old comrades in the IRA a favour?
3 Nov 2025 · Army Recruitment · Hansard source
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It’s in Hansard !
3 Nov 2025 · Army Recruitment · Hansard source
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As General Lord Dannatt, the former Chief of the General Staff, said at the weekend, “if potential recruits to our Armed Forces do not believe that their government will stand by them when performing their duties in a lawful manner, why risk joining at all?” He was speaking about Labour’s new Northern Ireland Troubles Bill, which could see Northern Ireland veterans, without whom there would never have been a Good Friday agreement in the first place, in the dock again by next year. The Minister called opponents of this “naive”. What is her response to the former head of the British Army and the brave soldiers he led—were they all naive, too?
3 Nov 2025 · Army Recruitment · Hansard source
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It is in Hansard .
30 Oct 2025 · Property Service Charges · Hansard source
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As a constituency MP, I have had some appalling experiences with FirstPort, at Oak Lodge in Hockley and at King Georges Court in Rayleigh. The latter is a four-storey McCarthy Stone development that it manages, where the lift was out of action for almost a year. Is not the fundamental problem with FirstPort that it is ultimately owned by several offshore venture capital companies that are very aggressive in seeking revenue from their tenants, but do not seem very willing to provide a decent quality of service in return?
29 Oct 2025 · Asylum Seekers: MOD Housing · Hansard source
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On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. We have just been debating the important matter of asylum seekers in MOD accommodation. Could you confirm, as I hope Hansard will, that in the nearly 37 minutes that we have spent debating this important matter, no Member of Reform has been in the Chamber or, indeed, made any contribution whatsoever?
22 Oct 2025 · Korean War: 75th Commemoration · Hansard source
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My right hon. Friend is making an excellent, poignant speech. In 2013, as the then Veterans Minister, I had the great honour of going to South Korea with His Royal Highness the Duke of Gloucester to represent the Government at the 60th anniversary of the armistice. As my right hon. Friend knows, the South Koreans refer to this day to the countries, like ours, that sent them aid as the sending states. I was very struck by the tremendous lengths to which the South Koreans went to look after our veterans who attended the commemorations. They were treated with immense reverence. Will my right hon. Friend allow me to place on the record today my great thanks to the South Koreans for everything that they do to remember the sending states and those troops who came to defend democracy in their land?
22 Oct 2025 · Korean War: 75th Commemoration · Hansard source
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My hon. Friend highlights the fact that the Glorious Glosters were awarded a US Presidential Unit Citation, which is extremely rare for a non-American unit. Another link is that the Korean war memorial in Washington has a very brief inscription that reads simply, “Freedom is not free.” Does my hon. Friend agree that the defence of Gloster Hill by the Glorious Glosters, and the casualties they suffered, are a living embodiment of that great motto?
14 Oct 2025 · Points of Order · Hansard source
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On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. As you know, when we have a Budget, the Chancellor of the Exchequer delivers the Budget and then the Red Book, with all the fine detail, the numbers and the graphs, is immediately made available to MPs, so that they can at least glance through it and ask the Chancellor questions. Conversely, this afternoon we just have spent nearly an hour and a half debating a statement about a Bill and a very important remedial order that we were quite deliberately not allowed to see. Surely it would have been better if hon. Members had been allowed to receive the Bill and the remedial order—at least to glance at it for a few minutes—so they could have asked much better informed questions of the Secretary of State. Unfortunately, the Secretary of State has organised this cynically to prevent that. Madam Deputy Speaker, how do we prevent that from happening again?
13 Oct 2025 · Digital ID · Hansard source
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I am completely opposed to digital ID cards as a matter of principle. The proposal was not in the Labour party manifesto, and the Government have no mandate for it. It is basically a multibillion-pound gimmick to try to address the fact that small boat arrivals are up a third since they came to power and they have not got the faintest clue how to stop them. I have two very specific questions to ask of the Secretary of State. First, how much—even as a ballpark figure—will it cost to bring in this system? Secondly, if it is to be mandatory, which would be completely wrong, what would be the penalty for a citizen who refuses on principle to have digital ID?
13 Oct 2025 · Digital ID · Hansard source
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Ah! [ Laughter. ]
9 Sept 2025 · Diego Garcia Military Base and British Indian Ocean Territory Bill · Hansard source
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This is fundamental to the whole argument. We have pressed the Government for months to tell us what the legal threat to the islands was. In his opening speech the Minister said that it was UNCLOS. That was the justification they have given us. Does my right hon. and learned Friend agree that we have a general opt-out and two specific opt-outs under article 298(1)(b) of the United Nations convention on the law of the sea, which includes “disputes concerning military activities”? We have an opt-out from UNCLOS. The Government’s whole case is spurious—£35 billion worth of spurious.
9 Sept 2025 · Diego Garcia Military Base and British Indian Ocean Territory Bill · Hansard source
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Is it the case—my right hon. and learned Friend is a former Attorney General—that the ITU treaty to which we and others are a party states specifically that the ITU has no authority over the allocation of military spectrum, or military communications? It is clear that the ITU has no leverage legally at all over Diego Garcia.
8 Sept 2025 · Veterans: Support · Hansard source
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Nearly a fifth of a million people have now signed the parliamentary petition to protect Northern Ireland veterans from prosecution, in opposition to Labour’s proposals for two-tier justice. Surely Ministers must understand that facilitating lawfare against our Army veterans, none of whom received letters of comfort after leaving their service, shows that Labour just does not have their back?
8 Sept 2025 · Veterans: Support · Hansard source
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Labour’s currently stalled remedial order would specifically make it easier for Gerry Adams and his friends to sue the British taxpayer while throwing our Army veterans, many of them recruited from red wall seats, to the wolves. After everything the Government put their Back Benchers through in recent months, are No. 10 and Ministers really intending to press ahead with this madness and do Gerry Adams a favour, at the expense of the soldiers who opposed him? Are they pressing ahead with the remedial order—yes or no?
4 Sept 2025 · Business of the House · Hansard source
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I will be short, as I already am. Can we have a debate about delays in obtaining driving tests? There is a growing problem with unscrupulous operators using bots to sweep up months’ worth of tests then selling them back to very frustrated parents and students at a profit. The Driving and Vehicle Standards Agency seems to be in denial about this issue. Can we have a debate in Parliament and try to fix this problem?
2 Sept 2025 · The Battle of Britain · Hansard source
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The whole House is grateful to my right hon. Friend for that very telling intervention. While I have the opportunity, I pay tribute to his marvellous speech and, more than that, to the wonderful service of his father, of whom he can be immensely proud. Also fundamental were the RAF commanders, principally Air Chief Marshal Sir Keith Park, who famously commanded 11 Group, which bore the brunt of the battle. Park, a New Zealander, displayed tactical brilliance in the husbanding of his squadrons, while also fighting a highly aggressive and effective defence. Overall, however, perhaps the greatest single contribution to victory was that of the leader of Fighter Command throughout the battle, Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding. As well as being a pilot, Dowding was keenly interested in scientific development, which he pursued zealously when promoted to the Air Council in 1930, with responsibility for supply and research. That critical appointment was to have profound consequences for the subsequent conduct of the battle a decade later, as several right hon. Members have alluded to. Dowding had three great attributes that materially contributed to the RAF’s victory. First, he possessed tremendous foresight. Like Churchill, he realised very early on that Nazi Germany and its nascent air force would one day provide a potentially fatal threat to Britain’s security, and he began to plan accordingly. Secondly, Dowding’s genius—I use the word deliberately —was that he conceptualised years in advance the battle that the RAF would have to fight. He then used his new appointment enthusiastically to pull together multiple strands of scientific development, crucially including Watson-Watt’s experiments with radar, to create a highly resilient defensive system. In May 1937, Dowding presciently delivered a lecture to the air staff regarding the air defence of Great Britain, in which the scenario he outlined was one of a war with a European dictator—the inference was obvious —attempting to starve Britain into submission by the aggressive use of submarines, but not before the United Kingdom had been subjected to an all-out assault designed to destroy the RAF and cripple the nation’s ability to make war, by remorseless attack from the air. As head of the newly created Fighter Command from July 1936, Dowding went on to create a command and control network alerted by radar, all feeding into Fighter Command headquarters at RAF Bentley Priory, and supported by an organisation of group and sector headquarters designed to co-ordinate timely fighter interception of incoming German aircraft. That was all interconnected by a system of telephone and, later, teleprinter communications. The historian and operational analyst Stephen Bungay, in his brilliant book, “The Most Dangerous Enemy”, describes that system as “the world’s first intranet”, albeit an analogue version, half a century before Tim Berners-Lee. Critically, the Dowding system, as it became known, allowed the RAF to make best use of its resources in combating an enemy that frequently outnumbered it three, or even four, to one. Thirdly, Dowding possessed tremendous moral courage in dealing with superiors, up to and including Churchill. The epic 1969 movie “The Battle of Britain”, with its all-star cast, opens with the Dowding letter of 16 May 1940, which my right hon. Friend the Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale (David Mundell) referred to. In it, Dowding famously argued the need to conserve Britain’s fighter strength during the fall of France. As he trenchantly put it, “if the Home Defence Force is drained away in desperate attempts to remedy the situation in France, defeat in France will involve the final, complete and irremediable defeat of this country.” In Dowding, Britain possessed a commander with an absolutely single-minded determination to prepare meticulously for, to fight and then to win the battle, for which his pilots, whom he referred to affectionately as “my boys”, held him in particular reverence. His truly was the controlling mind that orchestrated the ultimately successful defence of these islands. Like many commanders before him, Dowding was a maverick, but he was not an extrovert. He was socially awkward, which led to his nickname “Stuffy”. He never suffered fools gladly, and his manner could be abrupt, even when dealing with superiors, which ultimately led to his downfall. Nevertheless, he was a man utterly dedicated to his task, and one to whom history owes an immense debt. Arguably, had Dowding never been born we might even have lost the battle, as we would undoubtedly have been far less well prepared to fight it.
2 Sept 2025 · The Battle of Britain · Hansard source
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It is a fact that partly because of the great efforts of Lord Beaverbrook overseeing aircraft production, we never ran out of aircraft in the battle—but we very nearly ran out of pilots. So does my right hon. Friend agree with me that part of Dowding’s genius was generating enough pilots and then taking sufficient care of them so that we won?

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