Tom Tugendhat: belief

Transcript context

…Very last question. What led you to enter politics when you did? It matters. It just really matters. I’d been a soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan for the best part of 10 years, 15 years. Not full time in Iraq and Afghanistan, but I’d been soldiering for 10 or 15 years, and it was time for me to go and do something else. If you care about your country and you care about the way in which we’re governed, then there’s only one place the orders start, and that’s with a democracy, that’s in Parliament. What I’d seen in the armed forces was young men and women doing the most extraordinary things, demonstrating the most extraordinary courage, serving our country in the most extraordinary way. I’d seen some amazing leadership. Real leaders at every level, leaders at very junior level, 21-, 22-year-old corporals demonstrating real leadership, and the person I work for, the chief of the defense staff, so the most senior general in the British army, demonstrating real strategic leadership. I’d seen that we need to act on it, and so I brought what I thought was the best of that, and I tried to bring some of that to Parliament. Because there’s a lot of people who, these days, I know, in both of our cultures — because there’s a very high respect for the military in the United States and the United Kingdom, there’s a lot of people who say, “Well, then there must be a military answer to this.” Not just by the use of force, but you call in a general to fix a problem because generals do stuff. Of course, on one level, that’s true, that’s right. But on another level, it simply cannot be right that the only way to help disadvantaged kids is for them to join the armed forces, or the only way for young people to have an opportunity from a certain area is to join the armed forces. Time and again, the young men and women I was working with had a brother or a sister or a parent who was unbelievably disadvantaged and just couldn’t get a way out of it, and they’d got out of it through the military. But again, that can’t be the only way out of it. I got into politics because I think you’ve got to find a better way of fixing things. You’ve got to find a better way out of these things. You’ve got to find a better way of solving these problems. I think a military attitude helps because it’s an attitude of building a team and delivering. It’s an attitude that seeks to respect and support leadership, and offering that leadership is what matters. That’s why I’m standing as well. I’m standing because I think if you want to serve your country, if you want to offer leadership at a moment when, frankly, the world is deeply uncertain and the challenges at home of underinvestment over 30, 40 years have never been more obvious, the need to act in the national interest has never been stronger, and that’s what I think we need out of British politics today. Tom Tugendhat, thank you very much.…

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