During our next webinar, The Freedom Association will be looking at defence and security: the opportunities post-Brexit Britain presents, and the challenges that as a country we face. It will be held on Tuesday 2nd February at 6.00 pm. Confirmed panellists are:

Colonel Richard Kemp: Richard served as an officer in the British Army from 1977 to 2006. During his years of service, he completed eight tours of Northern Ireland. During one of those tours he was wounded in a multiple terrorist mortar attack in South Armagh. He took command of British Forces in Afghanistan in 2003, although most of the last five years of Richard’s military career were spent in Downing Street as head of the international terrorism team at the Joint Intelligence Committee, where he was responsible for producing assessments on the growing global terrorist problem for the Prime Minister and the Cabinet.

Rt. Hon Julian Lewis MP: Julian is the Chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament. Prior to that, he was Chair of the House of Commons Defence Committee from 2015 to 2019. During that period he supervised the production of more than 30 Inquiry Reports and consistently campaigned to renew the Trident nuclear deterrent submarines and to restore the Defence budget from two per cent to three per cent of GDP. Julian is a member of The Freedom Association, and has served as the Conservative Member of Parliament for New Forest East since 1997.

Tim Scott: Tim is the Treasurer of The Freedom Association and served as a Captain in The Queen’s Fusiliers. Tim was a Platoon Commander in charge of 25-30 soldiers, and served in Cyprus and Northern Ireland. Tim now works as a Business Development Manager.

The webinar will be chaired by David Cambell Bannerman, our Chairman, who served on the Defence Sub-Committee at the European Parliament and also served in the Territorial Army (OTC).

Places are limited. Click here to register.

After the Prime Minister's statement to the House of Commons regarding Russia, Dr Julian Lewis MP, chair of the Defence Committee and a member of The Freedom Association, asked the following question:

"No reasonable person can possibly doubt that the Russian Government have behaved with arrogance, inhumanity and contempt, not least in failing to respond to the Prime Minister’s deadline, which they surely would have done if they had known that they were innocent of this charge. In welcoming the Prime Minister’s expulsion of 23 diplomats who are really intelligence agents, may I ask her to make it clear that any retaliation in kind by the Russian Government will be met by further expulsions, perhaps including even of the ambassador, who spends so much time coming to talk to us in this place, bemoaning the poor state of Anglo-Russian relations? Does she accept that Russia traditionally respects strength and despises weakness, and that the time has come to recognise that 2% of GDP is not enough to spend on defence when we are reverting to the sort of adversarial relationship that we had when we spent a much higher proportion of GDP on ensuring that this country was well defended?"