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North Africa and the Middle East

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard). Of course, if he goes to Tunis, he will see the ruins of Carthage, where our dear Roman friends sought to ensure that the Carthaginians were destroyed and not permitted a future. We do not want to revert to that kind of parallel. There are a couple of interesting anniversaries for us to consider today. One is dear to me: it is 30 years since the suppression of the Polish union Solidarnosc at the end of 1981. That great hopeful moment of liberation for the Polish people was then crushed by a cruel dictatorship, and we did not know how to respond. I hope that we can think constructively about what is happening in north Africa, which indeed is a revolutionary moment and a hopeful moment for the world. We have heard good speeches from both sides of the House in what is a most enjoyable debate to listen to. Today is also an anniversary of a different sort, because exactly one month ago, on 17 February, the Foreign Secretary came to the House to make a statement on Bahrain, in response to an urgent question granted by Mr Speaker. The Foreign Secretary had just been there, and immediately following his visit there were the first demonstrations, repressions and killings; however, he did not seem to know that this was about erupt. It is that lack of what I would call intuitive imagination about world affairs that is the problem in our handling of foreign policy. I am not making a strictly party political point, because the same applies just as much to the previous Administration. I asked the Foreign Secretary to come to the House and, as the hon. Member for Mid Sussex (Nicholas Soames) pointed out in his excellent speech, I asked him:"““Does he agree that a wind of change is blowing through the Arab world””?" I also put it to him that he should"““agree to a wide review of UK foreign policy in the region before it is too late””.—[Official Report, 17 February 2011; Vol. 523, c. 1136.]" I wish that such a review had taken place earlier, but as so often in our country, it is now taking place under the force of events. There have been some unhappy reactions, but there is no point going over who made a mistake, who went on an arms sales trip, which planes could not leave the tarmac and the rest of it. Rather, we should work out how we need to go forward. I will not talk about making any sort of military intervention in Libya, because there are others who are experts. However, if, as the hon. Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart) pointed out, the intervention in Iraq helped to increase al-Qaeda's standing and status, then perhaps non-intervention in Libya will have exactly the same impact. In the non-intervention philosophy of the 1930s—if I could take my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Ms Stuart) a little before her birth date—the line was ““Do not intervene””, and as a result the most horrible dictatorships and repressions were given the green light. What do we have as a foreign policy? There are perhaps three components to our foreign policy: hard power, soft power and political influence. Sadly, because of cuts in the military our hard power is, frankly, decreasing. We have two aircraft carriers that are now Britain's no-fly zones because we do not have planes that can fly off them. We are also heavily engaged in Afghanistan. However, just as America's international influence was drained by its presence in Vietnam year after year—the Americans stayed for many years after they could serve any useful purpose, allowing Brezhnev and other horrible dictators to roam freely round the world—we need to look at reducing our profile in Afghanistan faster. We need to look at the fact that we are cutting back our diplomatic service, including our diplomatic foreign language training schools. The hon. Member for Penrith and The Border appealed for more Arab-speakers. ““Ditto,”” say I, but we are not just cutting Arab-speaking diplomats; we are cutting our entire diplomatic presence. Moving to soft power, the last time the Foreign Secretary came to the House to answer an urgent question, it was to defend the cuts to the BBC World Service. Two weeks ago the Secretary of State for International Development announced that he was cutting support for the International Labour Organisation's core funding. However, there are trade unions in Egypt and Tunis; indeed, I have been meeting them on and off for 20 years, including the Union Générale Tunisienne du Travail, the one Tunisian trade union that has some independence. That union wants help from the ILO and the TUC, but we are cutting such aid at the very moment that it could be most useful in building civil society. We are also reducing the number of students from those areas coming to study in Britain. We have fewer Chevening scholarships, but more importantly, we are saying to those students around the world, ““You're no longer welcome to come and study in mainstream British universities,”” because of the anti-immigration nostrums of the Conservatives, in thrall to an unpleasant press. That is the decline in our soft power. I put it to the House that every Tunisian, Libyan or Egyptian who comes and gets a degree in Britain leaves a friend of Britain.