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UK Relations: Libya

I totally concur with my hon. Friend. The United Kingdom's reputation was greatly damaged at the time. As I suggested, other Arab League leaders were so contemptuous of this bizarre, tyrannical clown that they told me and others, ““If the United Kingdom cannot grapple effectively with Gaddafi, who can they effectively engage with and have a meaningful relationship with?””. I stopped the previous Labour Foreign Secretary, the right hon. Member for South Shields (David Miliband)—the man who aspired to lead the Labour party—in the Members' Lobby to ask him about PC Yvonne Fletcher. The Foreign Office had ignored her relatives for years—letter after letter had gone ignored—so to get him finally to meet them, I had to write an open letter on Conservative Home demanding that he did so. Before I did that, however, I stopped him in the Members' Lobby and asked him to raise these issues and to assist me in fighting for PC Yvonne Fletcher and the victims of the IRA, who had suffered because of Gaddafi's funding of it. To quote him verbatim, he said, ““Don't rock the boat now, Kawczynski. We're in very delicate negotiations with Colonel Gaddafi—rapprochement. We don't want you rocking the boat.”” He basically told me to shut up and not to try to stir things up. That is why I believe his judgment was wrong, and why I commend the Labour party on not electing him as leader; I do not think that he is fit to be the leader of the Labour party, given his action then. I hope that the shadow Minister will agree that this was not Labour's best moment or its finest hour. How would the Libyan people view us now, if all they had to go on was the incredible rapprochement between Mr Blair and Colonel Gaddafi, and all the pictures of them smiling together in the tent where they met? I contrast that with the superb leadership that our current Prime Minister has shown in helping to secure UN resolution 1973 in order to ensure that NATO's intervention to protect the citizens of Libya was legal. I remember going back to my apartment after a late-night vote in February, and watching Colonel Gaddafi on Sky News promising that he would hunt the rebels down city by city, street by street and wardrobe by wardrobe—that was the expression he used. He promised the world that a bloodbath would ensue on the streets of Benghazi and Tobruk if he were given an unfettered opportunity to pursue that. That night I texted the Prime Minister's Parliamentary Private Secretary three or four times, pleading with him to take the message to the Prime Minister that we must intervene to help those courageous people in Libya, fighting for their freedom against a brutal tyrant. I thank the Prime Minister for taking the decision to support the people, and I rejoice in, and thank God for, the fact that not a single member of British service personnel lost their life. If we contrast that with previous military operations, we see that it is something for which we should all be extremely grateful. Our interaction with Libya reminds me of something that the Prime Minister said at the Conservative party conference:"““It's not the size of the dog in the fight—it's the size of the fight in the dog””." That encapsulates how, despite the extraordinary problems that this country has—the huge economic deficit that the Labour party so kindly bequeathed us—we can still intervene around the world and help people who are worse off than us, and protect them when they struggle for the freedom that we have enjoyed for such a long time. Among the things that I have done as a Member of Parliament in the past six years, one of the most pertinent to this debate and the most solemn has been to stand in the British war cemetery in Tripoli. It has beautiful green grass, immaculately cut, and beautiful headstones, immaculately washed. It contrasts with the surrounding district, which is rather shabby and dusty. I stood for hours looking at the headstones of our young service personnel who died so tragically, liberating Tripoli during the second world war. It is deeply striking that so many of them were so young: 22 or 23—some as young as 20. They all died in January 1942 in the liberation of Tripoli, and there is row after row of headstones. I hope that those sacrifices during the second world war, and what we have done, today show the people of Libya that they can trust and depend on us. I pay tribute to a dear friend of mine from my constituency—Mr Ted Sharp, who was a desert rat. I have spent many hours listening to his stories of how there were no food supplies at one stage; some of the desert rats were like skeletons. They went through terrible suffering to free Libya. The manner in which Colonel Gaddafi died rather shocked me, but I did not shed many tears for his passing. The way in which he was killed shows how despised he was by the Libyan people, but I was disappointed that he was not captured and put on trial. It would have given me great satisfaction to see him atone for the brutality he meted out to his own people for so long.