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UK Relations: Libya

I thank my hon. Friend. Being British, I blush at such compliments. I do not want this to turn into a mutual love-in. Yesterday marked the end of British military involvement in Libya, seven months after the no-fly zone was authorised, and I would argue that it was one of the most successful NATO operations in history. It proved, all the more importantly after the Iraq conflict, that intervention can work and that Britain can fight for peace and democracy. Although I was disappointed at the manner of Gaddafi's death because it would have been better for him to be tried in the international courts, I wish that my grandfather, Renato Halfon, was alive now to have seen his demise. In 1968, after some anti-Jewish pogroms, my grandfather was forced to leave Libya and, as an Italian Jew, he went to Rome. He had planned to return to Tripoli once the pogroms had subsided, but Gaddafi took power in 1969 and all the Jewish businesses and my grandfather's home were taken. The same thing happened to the Jews and the Italians. Luckily, my grandfather had sent my father to England some years earlier. I love Britain—I was born here and would not live anywhere else—but I feel a deep concoction of Jewish and Italian from Libya, which has been awakened by recent events. I listened with considerable interest to the story that my hon. Friend the Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham told about being in Poland, particularly the part about the oranges, and about what motivated him to fight for freedom in Libya. It has been good to have conversations with my father and his friends from Libya to try to understand what it was like in those days. My grandfather had a clothing business and sold clothes to the British, and he always said that they were the only people who paid on time. He loved this country more than anything; he thought that the streets were metaphorically paved with gold and that everyone in England was a gentleman. It is worth remembering that King Idris was installed as monarch of Libya in 1951 by the British, in the aftermath of the war, when Libya gained independence from Italy and the old colonial name Tripolitania disappeared. Although my grandfather and many other people had contempt for Gaddafi, we must acknowledge that in the early days the colonel was not a monster. My father remembers him becoming a rapidly popular figure, who before the coup used to walk down the famous Italian street in Tripoli, Corso Vittorio Emanuele—I think it is now called Jadat Istiklal—shaking hands with passers-by, including my father, wearing a broad serene smile and speaking loudly. He was articulate and nurtured dreams of pan-Arabism, and because of King Idris's benign weakness, he became known as the liberator. Astonishing as it might seem, he was seen as sympathetic to western interests, and so the Americans, who controlled the large Wheelus air base outside Tripoli, did nothing to stop the coup d'état against the king. No one imagined that Gaddafi would become the monster he did and impose a 42-year totalitarian regime. Now he has gone, everyone is asking, ““What next? Will it be a repeat of Iraq in the aftermath of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein?”” It is worth emphasising that a yearning for freedom is deep in every human breast and should be nurtured and supported. The Libyan people deserve freedom just as much as we do in the west. For years, the realist school of foreign policy—I am sure that the Minister is not of that school—has argued that the middle east is not ready for democracy and that democracy cannot be dropped from a B-52 bomber, but actually it can. The NATO planes showed that by providing cover as the rebels advanced on Tripoli, although that is not the only way to do it. We must remember that liberty is a human right for everyone, whatever their background or race. Sometimes it requires military intervention, and sometimes it requires hearts and minds—so-called soft power. Our foreign policy should be directed at supporting groups of resistance to dictators, and at funding radio and TV stations and the internet, in the same way as the CIA did in the cold war to try to combat communism. Where is the middle east equivalent of Radio Free Europe? What is not required is appeasement. Appeasement often works in the short term but never in the long. The previous Government, as well as some of our universities and businesses, lost their moral bearings when it came to dealing with the Libyan regime. I happened to support Tony Blair and the invasion of Iraq, yet the complete contrast between that and what his Government did with Libya was astonishing. While senior new Labour Government figures hobnobbed with Gaddafi and his family, academic institutions accepted millions of pounds in blood money from the regime, and companies rushed to Libya to sign commercial deals. The London School of Economics, in perhaps the most shameful episode in the university's history, went cap in hand to Gaddafi and treated him like some kind of king from over the water. I am glad that one of the professors implicated in that disgusting scandal resigned today, according to reports in The Times. The leader of the Labour party talks about predator and producer capitalism, and I do not think there has been a more horrific example of predator corporate capitalism than the commercial dealings between the previous Government and so-called big business and the Libya regime. I do not say that to make a party political point; I just cannot get my head around how the previous Government could do some good things in Iraq but behave so disgracefully when it came to Libya. The release of the Lockerbie murderer, al-Megrahi, marked the low point of that kind of appeasement by the establishment, and I would argue that the political establishment's flirtation with Gaddafi was akin to the appeasement of Hitler before the second world war by British upper-class aristocrats. In having the courage to support intervention and ignore the armchair generals who said we could not or should not get involved, the Prime Minister did much to correct Britain's moral compass, but I urge the Minister and the Government to launch a serious inquiry into the previous Government's relations with Gaddafi. We must learn from what went wrong, so that we never, ever, do such a thing again with such an evil regime.