North Africa and the Middle East

Lord Watts Excerpts

Thursday 24th March 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hague]

I cannot see—so many Government throughout the world have said this so many times over the past few weeks—any peaceful or viable future for the people of Libya if Gaddafi is still there. It is more than desirable; I put that in its politest form. It is essential that he gets out; it is essential that he goes. I hope my hon. Friend will not mistake in any way the strength of our message and the international community’s message on that. Let me also stress, however, as I did in answer to the hon. Member for North East Derbyshire (Natascha Engel), that our military mission is to implement the United Nations resolution, and that we will stick strictly to its implementation.

[Mr Dave Watts (St Helens North) (Lab)]

Given the responses to earlier questions, how would the Government deal with a situation where it became clear that Gaddafi was going to stay in power for the foreseeable future? Would we leave our forces and sanctions in place indefinitely?

[Mr Hague]

I am not sure that in this situation it is helpful to get into all the hypothetical scenarios of what may come. Clearly, we are planning for scenarios, particularly on the humanitarian and stabilisation side, as I said, but we have to concentrate on the implementation of the resolution and on taking such work forward. A whole variety of scenarios could be foreseen, but to get into providing a commentary and speculating on each of them would be helpful neither to our forces involved at the moment nor in achieving our immediate objectives.