2 October 2007
The Prime Minister has delivered an address to troops in Basra as he continued his tour of Iraq.
Read the full speech:
Prime Minister:
Can I say first of all what a privilege it is to be here this afternoon to be able to thank you personally for the magnificent service you are giving to our country. I want to thank you for your professionalism which is seen every day in the way that you operate here in Basra and in the surrounding area, and you are famed, we are famed - Britain - for our professionalism, and I want to thank you for your dedication and your commitment because everywhere I have gone I have seen people refer to the dedication and commitment of the British forces. And I want to thank you most of all for your courage.
Winston Churchill said courage was the greatest quality of all, because it was upon courage that everything depended. And you have shown courage way beyond the call of duty, bravery in difficult circumstances, many of you working inside Basra itself, some of you working in Basra Palace where it was very difficult, many of you on operations which have been risky and dangerous, many of you here fired upon by the shelling that has been done against this base here. So all of you deserve our thanks for the bravery and courage which I believe has marked the presence of our British forces here in Iraq and particularly here. I want to thank you for what you have achieved in Basra.
Sometimes people ask does it make a difference? And I tell you it does. What you are doing is making a huge difference, it is building a democracy in this country by sustaining those people who want the people of the country, and not terrorists, to control the future of the country. You are helping build a police force and security forces that we can handle, but … too so that the security forces can be responsible themselves, the local security forces for security.
Many of you are helping build the economy here, the infrastructure, the schools and the hospitals, protecting them, helping them be built for the future. So in everything that you are doing I just want to thank you for making a difference. And I want to say to you how proud I am, how proud I believe all the British people are for what you have managed to do and what you are achieving.
I want to thank our Australian colleagues here in advance - because of the defeat that will be inflicted in the Rugby World Cup … I want to thank our American colleagues here and I want to thank people who are from every continent. And if you feel it is very hot here, let me tell you it is cold and raining in Britain, so I am quite happy to be here in the heat with you today.
Many of you will go home in the next few months, many of you have still some months to do, and some of you I know are going home in the next few days, some of you have still many, many months which you will be here. But all of you are doing a fantastic job serving our country, and I want to be able to go back and tell the people of Britain that the men and women who serve us here, where the morale I have seen coming round is fantastic and marvellous, are building a new Iraq, helping the people of Iraq and doing it because we believe that wherever there is injustice in the world, and wherever we can make a difference, we are prepared to do what we can to help.
So let me, on behalf of the British people, thank you, let me say I cannot predict how the Rugby World Cup will end. I am sorry about Wales, sorry about Ireland. Scotland and England still have a chance. I suspect England have a better chance of a place than Scotland, even although I am a Scottish supporter.
I want to thank all of you for everything that you are doing. Please take back to your friends, and neighbours and relatives also my thanks because I know you have been separated from them for many months, and in some cases for a longer period of time.
Thank you for everything you do. I am very proud of you. Let us continue to serve the world in the way that the British forces do spectacularly well by your professionalism, by your dedicated commitment and by what I applaud today, your courage. You are brave, you are courageous and I am incredibly proud of you.
Thank you very much.
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