It has been a week where the actions of our country have been on display on a global stage and we have not come out of it very well.

Last week we saw the vote to leave the EU with its consequences not just for the financial markets in this country but also for markets across the world.

Yesterday we saw the announcement of the Chilcot report into the decision to take our troops into Iraq. I suppose both are illustrations of the fact that we are still a significant country in world affairs. But they also illustrate the degree of responsibility that comes with that position on the world stage.

All of our politicians, myself included, need to think very carefully before we do or say anything, particularly on major international issues like going to war or breaking our ties with our long standing trading partners.

We need to be aware that there are always at least two sides to any of these questions, the British one and the one of those in other countries.

Clearly the British one is our primary concern but that should not be our only concern. We have learned that the nature of the debate around the EU departure has done nothing to build respect for our country in the rest of the world.

For many people I spoke to the objective of voting leave was to make our country great again. Sadly in the eyes of many of our neighbours the referendum debate, let alone the decision, seems to have taken us backwards on that score. And then we have the results of the Chilcot report.

We have now learned that our prime minister at the time took us into an under resourced, under planned and arguably unnecessary war that planted the seeds that led to the creation of Daesh, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and importantly of 179 of our own servicemen and women.

Again something that will do nothing to build the respect of Britain in the world’s eyes. At the time one of the lone, and lonely, voices against the war was the then leader of the Liberal Democrats Charles Kennedy.

It gives me no pleasure to report that he stood up for what he felt was right in the face of considerable abuse and criticism from all sides of the political spectrum.

Clearly none of the people who voted in favour of our troops being sent to Iraq put in the degree of scrutiny and thought that they should have done to the issues involved and as a result the world is much less safer than it was.

Scrutiny is one of the key jobs of your MP and clearly a lot of them did not do a very good job. My only hope is that at least the families of the service people involved get some comfort from the report. I suppose that its publication, albeit far too late, does at least illustrate that we are still an open country.

Tim Farron, Westmorland and Lonsdale MP, and leader of the Liberal Democrats