Tony Baldry (Banbury): No one can doubt the Prime Minister's commitment to the United Nations, but neither can those of us who are instinctive supporters of the United Nations be insensitive to the haemorrhaging of its support in Washington and elsewhere. Does he believe that that can be remedied with a change of attitude by France, China and Russia, or is he suggesting that more fundamental reform of the UN is required if it is to command universal respect again?

The Prime Minister: There are issues to do with how the UN works and operates, and some of those will take a long time to resolve. They are well known - membership of the Security Council and so on - but unless the leading countries in the world come to some sense of how we handle similar situations in future, the UN will be ineffective because there will be no agreement between the leading countries. In the end, that is what we have to work on. In particular, the international community - especially Europe - has a fundamental question to resolve: do we want Europe and other countries to develop as a rival to the United States or do we want to work in partnership with it? If it is the former, I do not think that we will resolve such disputes in the UN because there will be the same disagreement that there has always been, as there was in the days of the cold war when the UN often could not work properly because there were two blocs of power that would not support each other's strategic interests. The only way in which we are going to make the UN more effective is by resolving some of those underlying political questions, and that political question in particular.