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00:37When I address my own Parliament at Westminster, we still follow an age-old tradition and take
00:44a Member of Parliament hostage, holding him or her at Buckingham Palace until I am safely
00:53returned.
00:58These days we look after our guests rather well, to the point that they often do not
01:03want to leave.
01:09I don't know, Mr Speaker, if there were any volunteers for that role here today.
01:25This is a city which symbolises a period in our shared history, or what Charles Dickens
01:31might have called A Tale of Two Georges.
01:44King George, as you know, never set foot in America.
01:48And please rest assured, ladies and gentlemen, I am not here as part of some cunning rearguard
01:55action.
02:09Two hundred and fifty years ago, or as we say in the United Kingdom, just the other day,
02:23a declared independence.
02:47The alliance that our two nations have built over the centuries, and for which we are profoundly
02:55grateful to the American people, is truly unique. Our defense, intelligence and security
03:02ties are hardwired together through relationships measured not in years, but in decades. The
03:10United Kingdom recognizes that the threats we face demand a transformation in British
03:17defense. That is why our country, in order to be fit for the future, has committed to
03:23the biggest sustained increase in defense spending since the Cold War. So as we look
03:30toward the next 250 years, we must also reflect on our shared responsibility to safeguard nature,
03:39our most precious and irreplaceable asset. Our generation must decide how to address the
03:49collapse of critical natural systems which threatens far more than the harmony and essential diversity
03:57of nature. We ignore at our peril the fact that these natural systems, in other words,
04:04nature's own economy, provide the foundation for our prosperity and our national security.
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