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Middle East

No; I hope that the hon. Lady will forgive me, but I have only a couple of minutes left. Fatah and Hamas have been at each other’s throats and have killed each other’s people. Time and time again, Fatah, certainly, has failed to take the opportunities it was given by the international community. Syria and Iran have played an inflammatory role, to say the least, in the situation in the middle east in the past few years. Iran is now in a position almost like—I hate to use historical analogies, but I shall use one here—revolutionary France in the 1790s. We should bear in mind what happened there with the ancien régime countries that surrounded Iran and the kind of revolutionary export that took place. I turn to Iran. I should be grateful if the Minister would give his thoughts on the fact that many people are beginning to think that there is an almost inevitability to Iran acquiring nuclear weapons. The Iranians are playing for time, and the United Nations Security Council seems unable to produce any form of sanctions that are likely to persuade them not to acquire them. Russia and China are, to say the least, equivocal. We face a similar problem in trying to restrain and constrain North Korea on the other side of the globe. It is impossible to disentangle the situation between Israel, the Palestinians and Lebanon from those in Iraq and Iran. I would like to think that, having sat through the summer, the Government now have a strategic path to deal with these interconnecting problems, because, as many hon. Members have said, they lead directly back here. It is in no way acceptable that British citizens should believe that the activities of the British Government and their foreign policy, even if one fundamentally disagrees with them, give one the right to commit atrocities in this country or abroad. There are other ways of doing things. Many of us have deep disagreements, and other minority groups in the UK have held such views. Finally, the Minister may not agree, but it is unfortunate—I am again being careful with my words here—that in a time in which the situation in the middle east appears to be deteriorating, the Prime Minister has for some time given the impression that he intends to stand down. There is a hiatus, and if one goes to the middle east and talks to people there, one will find that they are aware of it. There is an uncertainty about who is to succeed as Prime Minister. The ongoing hustings—I put it no stronger than that—within the party in government, such as the revelations in diaries and elsewhere, do not help to resolve a deteriorating situation in which there appears to be no overarching strategy from the British Government.