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North Africa and the Middle East

This has been a timely and excellent debate, and Members on both sides of the House have made valuable contributions. I wish to follow on from the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart), who made some very good points. One was about the amount of time that we should allow for significant changes to take place in north Africa and the middle east. He talked about it taking two decades or more, and I think he was absolutely right. Although things are happening very fast in the immediate situation, we have to take a long-term view. My hon. Friend was also right to say that we have to be more engaged and flexible with the various nation states that we are dealing with and make use of collective European values as well as the experiences of individual states. The relationship between France and Morocco is a good example, but not the only one, and we need to be intelligent about how we respond to developments. My hon. Friend the Member for North Thanet (Mr Gale) made an interesting point. He wondered why we were not in Hungary in 1956. The answer is that we were in Suez. He wondered why the west was not dealing with Czechoslovakia in 1968, and the answer is that we were in Vietnam. Well, we were not, but certainly the United States was. That is a signal that we have to think about our interests much more carefully than we have in the past. There are some parallels between the current situation and 1989 to 1991, but one of the most important parallels is with 1975, when the Helsinki accords were agreed. They gave comfort to the people of the Warsaw pact countries, because President Gerald Ford and others insisted on including human rights as a key plank of the accords. We should remember that and think about what it did later. We need to give that type of comfort to the middle east and north Africa now. The points that other hon. Members have made are worth embellishing. Democracy is a great thing, but the Foreign Secretary is absolutely right to say that we cannot rely on elections only—we also need democratic institutions, the rule of law and so forth. The Westminster Foundation is valuable in providing such help, but the EU needs to be willing to promote our values. Many hon. Members asked why the EU should show interest in the middle east and north Africa. The answer is that they are nearby, and we should have interests and links in nearby places.