Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)

My Lords, I declare an interest as someone who lived in the United States for four years and has spent a lot of time since then working on US-UK and transatlantic relations. The Government should not underestimate the seriousness of what is behind this. We have three more years of a Trump presidency. In terms of the ideas behind it, can I recommend to the Minister the piece that the noble Lord, Lord Roberts of Belgravia, wrote for Policy Exchange the other week, defending Churchill against those on the MAGA right in the United States who now see Churchill as a warmonger who should have made peace with Hitler in 1940 and who dragged the United States into an unnecessary European war? In view of the isolationist, back-to-the-1930s, “America first” moves going on within the American right, with the echoes of white supremacism and Christian nationalism of the southern states, do the Government not need to be a great deal braver to start the national conversation that the SDR called for about the new circumstances for national security, in which we are to move earlier with an increase in defence spending than it has so far said, and to be much more positive about closer links with our European neighbours and the European Union, both in security and economics?