Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Robert Halfon and Daniel Kawczynski

Monday 16th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Daniel Kawczynski (Shrewsbury and Atcham) (Con)]

11. What steps her Department is taking to commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day in schools.

[The Minister of State, Department for Education (Robert Halfon)]

Many schools and colleges already mark Holocaust Memorial Day—I have attended such a remembrance service at Harlow College—and they work closely with the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust and the Holocaust Educational Trust, two institutions that the Government support. That is all the more important given the 128 incidents of antisemitism in one year in our higher education institutions, and the fact that, sadly, such incidents are now at an all-time high.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

As well as educating children about the horrors of the holocaust and the second world war, can we take the opportunity to educate children about the tremendous courage, bravery and sacrifices of the Righteous Among the Nations? Many people on the continent gave up their lives to protect their Jewish friends and neighbours. One example was a member of my family, Jan Kawczynski, his wife Helena and their 13-year-old daughter Magdalena, who were all shot by the Germans for protecting and hiding their Jewish friends and neighbours on their estate in western Poland. As well as educating children about the misery of the holocaust, we must give them inspiration from the fact that many of our brothers and sisters in occupied Europe made the ultimate sacrifice to protect friends and neighbours of the Jewish faith.

[Robert Halfon]

Hear, hear. It was very moving to hear of the experience of my hon. Friend’s family, and I entirely agree with him: we must teach and remind people that there were many righteous Gentiles who suffered while doing everything possible to save Jews. A famous Polish lady, Irena Sendler, saved 2,000 Jewish children from the Warsaw ghettos, and was remembered in a special exhibition in the House of Commons in 2018, which I was pleased to attend. My hon. Friend has made a powerful point, and I am sure that schools up and down the country will be listening to what he says.

Fuel Prices

Debate between Robert Halfon and Daniel Kawczynski

Tuesday 15th November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Robert Halfon]

I agree with my hon. Friend. Often if someone is driving up the M11—as I often do—or any other motorway, they are hostage to the various petrol stations. As I will say later, we need a market study into competitiveness.

[Daniel Kawczynski (Shrewsbury and Atcham) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that rural areas, such as Shropshire, where there are limited bus services, are adversely affected by these expensive prices?

[Robert Halfon]

Absolutely. I welcome the fact that the Government are going to introduce pilots in some rural areas. I know that people will talk more about that today, but I thank my hon. Friend for his remarks.

In real terms, adjusted for inflation, motoring fuel has never been this expensive, apart from twice in history during historic crises of supply—Suez in 1956 and the OPEC strike in 1973. The current situation is being driven by higher taxes and we have to be realistic and truthful about who pays the lion’s share of fuel duty: it is ordinary families driving to work, mums taking their children to school, small businesses that cannot afford to drive vans or lorries, and non-motorists who depend on buses and who are also being crushed by rocketing food prices as the cost of road haulage goes through the roof.

UK Relations: Libya

Debate between Robert Halfon and Daniel Kawczynski

Tuesday 1st November 2011 Westminster Hall

[Daniel Kawczynski]

Yes, I totally concur with my hon. Friend. Indeed, I think that we were told that he had less than three months, not six months, to live, but he is still alive somewhere in Tripoli, two years on.

So passionately did I feel about the release of al-Megrahi that I even travelled to Qatar for an international conference. In front of a totally Arab audience in debates in Doha, I and others won the debate on a motion saying that the house deplored the release of the Lockerbie bomber. A young girl from the United Arab Emirates told me, “On the one hand, you expect us to join you in your war against international terrorism, but on the other hand, you are releasing a convicted bomber who was involved in the worst terrorist atrocity committed on UK soil since the second world war.” That was a very salient, pertinent point, and it certainly stuck in my mind.

[Robert Halfon (Harlow) (Con)]

I thank my hon. Friend for securing this important debate. Does he agree that the release of al-Megrahi marked the low point in the previous Government’s appeasement of Gaddafi? Does he also agree that they were hiding behind the fig leaf of devolution, given all the revelations that there have been about the surrounding commercial deals between them and Libya at the time?

[Daniel Kawczynski]

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.

[Robert Halfon]

Does my hon. Friend agree that what happened to Gaddafi and the manner of his death make it all the more important that his family be put on trial, both in Libya and the International Court of Justice, to ensure that the rule of law is followed, and that those people atone properly for their crimes?

[Daniel Kawczynski]

I very much agree with my hon. Friend.

--- Later in debate ---

[Robert Halfon (Harlow) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gray. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski) on securing the debate. He displays incredible knowledge of the subject, and his book on Gaddafi is an important read. I thank him for setting up the British Mena—middle east and north Africa—Council for parliamentarians, which gives some balance to the debate. I also congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for St Austell and Newquay (Stephen Gilbert) on his thoughtful remarks.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

I am sorry to intervene so early in my hon. Friend’s speech, but he has kindly mentioned my book on Colonel Gaddafi, which I gave to the Prime Minister before the last election. Does he know that in the book I thank him for all his work on Anglo-Libyan relations, referring to him as a rising star in the Conservative party who will be in a future Conservative Government?

[Robert Halfon]

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.

[Robert Halfon]

I bow to my hon. Friend’s incredible experience in these matters, but I was not arguing about what kind of intervention it was. In fact, Britain has shouldered too heavy a burden, and other NATO countries should have done more. However, many so-called armchair generals argued against any intervention per se.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

Many British businessmen coming back from Tripoli have alleged to me that they heard that Mr Blair personally benefited financially from various transactions with the Gaddafi regime—

[Mr James Gray (in the Chair)]

Order. The hon. Gentleman is stepping beyond the usual realms of courtesy in this place.