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North Africa and the Near and Middle East

It has certainly been a wide-ranging and interesting debate. We had the Foreign Secretary and the hon. Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski) competing as to who had visited the most distant locations, and the hon. Gentleman also expressed his concern that the Conservative party was dominated by Guardian-reading, Radio 4-listening liberal lefties, which I am sure was a revelation to the Foreign Secretary. My right hon. Friend the Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire South (Mr Alexander) welcomed the debate, which is timely and a welcome opportunity to discuss the momentous events taking place throughout the region. I do not want to appear churlish, but briefly I shall express a slight concern, because in Afghanistan we in the UK have a direct influence on events and a vital interest, with several thousand of our service personnel there, and this weekend the Bonn conference on the future of Afghanistan will take place, with more than 1,000 delegates attending. That would have been a significant moment even before the events of last weekend, so we should also recognise the considerable parliamentary concern about how the substantial gains made by the women of that country can be preserved. In a speech last week, the Foreign Secretary pointed out:"““In 2002 only 9% of Afghans had access to health facilities in their local area, today this proportion has risen to 85%. One in three of the six million children in school in Afghanistan is a girl. Just last year 50,000 new teachers were trained, over 30% of them women,””" and:"““Sixty nine female MPs were elected in 2010.””" That is why last week more than 100 Members of this House attended a photoshoot to show their support for the gains made by Afghan women, so I am slightly surprised that the Government did not this week schedule a debate in which they could have outlined their aspirations for the conference, but at the very least I hope that we will have more information in Foreign Office questions tomorrow and a report back next week. The other inevitable problem with a debate of this breadth is the difficulty of focusing clearly on particular areas and of developing clear themes. During the Foreign Secretary's speech I was not clear whether there was an overarching strategic approach. The issue of national strategy has concerned the Public Administration Committee, and I would have hoped to have seen more of the strategic thread, but perhaps that will emerge in the Minister's response. So I shall inevitably have to deal with matters country by country, and I apologise for those that I do not cover in the time available, but the Minister needs a reasonable amount of time to cover the wide range of issues that have been addressed. I shall begin with Somalia. There are massive governance issues that clearly have a huge effect on the local population, impacting on the safety of neighbouring countries such as Kenya in particular, and on world shipping, with continuing depredations from piracy, to which I shall return. The Minister will know only too well that I have been raising this with his Department for over a year. My persistent complaint has been that the Government have the right intentions but are slow in taking action and encouraging a collective international response. I welcome the statement that has been put out today indicating that discussions will be taking place at the European Council, but those discussions have to be translated into action. At the end of last month, the Prime Minister made a welcome announcement about the placing of private armed guards aboard vessels. Straight away, I wrote to the Home Secretary, who had been designated as the lead Minister on this, to pose a number of entirely proper questions. I asked what would be the procedures for command and control; what would be the rules of engagement; whether there would be arrangements with ship owners to recruit only reputable firms and individuals; whether there would be a register and, if so, who would maintain it; what sanction there would be against companies that were not in compliance; whether this would apply only off the Somali coast and into the Indian ocean or elsewhere; and what discussions there had been with other countries in the relevant region, where guards would embark and disembark. Those are absolutely core parts of a policy for dealing with piracy by the use of guards. There was no sound from the Home Office until today, when it faxed my office to say that it had transferred the matter to the Department for Transport. That does not show the sort of urgency that is needed, and unfortunately it has been only too typical of responses in this area, where the general direction has often been right but the implementation has been sorely lacking. October is when the piracy season starts in Somalia, because the monsoons go down and piracy therefore becomes easier. As was rightly pointed out in the debate, that is absolutely crucial, because it means that if the warlords and pirate organisers are the main source of funding for governance in Somalia, its governance will be enormously destabilised.