39-10-5 A Total and Unmitigated Defeat

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On Wednesday, 5 October 1938, Winston Churchill delivered a speech entitled A Total and Unmitigated Defeat to the House of Commons. The speech was given on the third day of the Munich Debate and lasted 45 minutes. Churchill, a Conservative back-bencher at the time, was critical of the Munich Agreement which had been signed six days earlier by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain under terms largely favourable to German dictator Adolf Hitler.

• I will begin by saying what everybody would like to ignore or forget but which must nevertheless be stated, namely, that we have sustained a total and unmitigated defeat, and that France has suffered even more than we have.
• We in this country, as in other Liberal and democratic countries, have a perfect right to exalt the principle of self-determination, but it comes ill out of the mouths of those in totalitarian states who deny even the smallest element of toleration to every section and creed within their bounds.
• It is the most grievous consequence of what we have done and of what we have left undone in the last five years - five years of futile good intentions, five years of eager search for the line of least resistance, five years of uninterrupted retreat of British power, five years of neglect of our air defences.
• You must have diplomatic and correct relations, but there can never be friendship between the British democracy and the Nazi power, that power which spurns Christian ethics, which cheers its onward course by a barbarous paganism, which vaunts the spirit of aggression and conquest, which derives strength and perverted pleasure from persecution, and uses, as we have seen, with pitiless brutality the threat of murderous force. That power cannot ever be the trusted friend of the British democracy.

https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/sittings/1938/oct/05 .