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North Africa and the Middle East

Last month I visited Israel and the west bank, and I refer hon. Members to my relevant entry in the Register of Members' Financial Interests. We have had an excellent and wide-ranging debate, with a number of powerful speeches, in particular from the hon. Members for Mid Sussex (Nicholas Soames) and for Beckenham (Bob Stewart). I found myself in pretty much complete agreement with what both had to say. We have also had a number of interesting speeches from Opposition Members, including from my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford South (Mike Gapes), the previous Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee. However, I should apologise to the hon. Members for South Thanet (Laura Sandys) and for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard) and to my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Ms Stuart) for not being in the Chamber for their speeches. Members in all parts of the House have addressed the practical challenges that we as British politicians face in providing the support to build democracy in the middle east and north Africa. I want to echo what a number of hon. Members have said about the importance of the work of the Westminster Foundation for Democracy. There has been some discussion about the appropriateness or otherwise of drawing parallels with previous periods of our history. The Westminster Foundation for Democracy was born out of the collapse of the iron curtain and the Berlin wall, and it has done some important work in central and eastern Europe, Africa, Lebanon and other parts of the world. We in the Opposition applaud that work and see an opportunity for the foundation, working with similar European, American and other foundations in north Africa and the middle east, to provide practical support in building democracy, not just for elections, but for all the other aspects of democracy that hon. Members have described. Quite understandably, hon. Members have referred to the history of the region and the mistakes that we and others have made. Let me say that because we have got things wrong in the past—and we have—that does not mean that we should not try to get things right in the future. It is not about the external imposition of democracy; it is about how we respond most appropriately to the demands of the people. My right hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Mr MacShane) made an important point about Parliament's role as an institution in supporting democracy, both in discussions such as today's debate and in all the practical ways that we can support the development of democracy in other parts of the world. Crucial to that is the point that the hon. Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood) made about the failure of multilateral institutions in the past few weeks, and in particular the slow response of the United Nations and the European Union. There are significant lessons that we need to learn from these crises, both now, as a matter of urgency, and moving forward. The hon. Member for Croydon South (Richard Ottaway), the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, spoke about the responsibility to protect. The crisis in Libya demonstrates that a great deal more work needs to be done to make policy on the responsibility to protect fully operational, otherwise it is, frankly, meaningless. My hon. Friend the Member for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi) challenged us to consider the grounds on which intervention should be made. She was absolutely right to remind us of the need for rigour in deciding when we should and should not intervene. We all have perspectives shaped by our own experience. For me personally, the failures of the international community in Bosnia and Rwanda in the 1990s shaped my outlook on many of the challenging issues that we now face. As I think the hon. Member for Beckenham said in response to my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton South East: where we can, we should. That is absolutely right. What we actually do is a whole other matter, and it will not necessarily involve military intervention. The discussions on intervention on both sides of the House have tended to focus purely on the military, which has relevance, but it also involves broader diplomatic, economic and other forms of engagement. Another important point made by a number of speakers was that there is no one-size-fits-all response to what is happening. The countries involved are very different from each other, with different histories, different political systems and different levels of development in their civil society. No two countries will require the same response.