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North Africa and the Middle East

Bluntly, yes—the use of Saudi arms and armour in Bahrain, particularly in the context of today's disturbing pictures of unarmed protesters being shot in the streets by security forces, means that we must question any continuing arms sales to countries that have records of repression. I regret that in the midst of the democratic revolutions, the Prime Minister, on his tour of the middle east, which had many positive aspects, was nevertheless accompanied by representatives of BAE Systems, QinetiQ, the Cobham group, Thales UK, Babcock International and Atkins. In the spirit of coalition, I remind Ministers of the Liberal Democrats' pre-election criticism of arms sales to the region, and specifically to Libya, and of our support for an international arms trade treaty and the prevention of arms sales to any regime that could use them for internal repression. That last objective has now been strongly expressed by the Minister, but I hope he confirms today that the sale of tear gas and crowd control ammunition to anyone is completely incompatible with those objectives. There is a clear danger that Libya will not be seen in future in the same light as Egypt and Tunisia; sadly, we might see it alongside Czechoslovakia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Hungary as one of the great failures of the international community to intervene on behalf of the people. I do not envy the Foreign Secretary the decisions he must make, but I can assure him of Liberal Democrat support for any belated action by the international community, although he was right to be wary of any intervention that could be described as ““western””. That would be a dangerous path to go down, and any intervention must be undertaken with wide international support. I support the remarks made by the right hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire South (Mr Alexander), the shadow Foreign Secretary, who said that we should look at other imaginative ways of intervening, particularly in respect of IT infrastructure, to make life impossible for the Libyan regime. The hon. Member for Mid Sussex (Nicholas Soames) made an eloquent speech in which he called for a complete policy rethink. There is a lot of truth in that. At UK, European and international level, we need to review how we can rapidly respond to situations such as the one in Libya. We need to do that quickly, because similar situations could soon emerge elsewhere.