Algeria

Mike Gapes Excerpts

Monday 21st January 2013 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

Let me say first that my hon. Friend is absolutely right to raise the issue of extremists from other parts of the world who are based in the United Kingdom and who threaten our security. The Government are doing everything that they can to ensure that we are secure from those people. We also need to address the issue of being able effectively to deport people when they threaten our country.

On the specific question my hon. Friend asks about the threat to the UK of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the principal threat it poses is, as I said, to those countries in the region and to the people of those countries in that region, and to our interests and our people in that region. But there has been a history with the al-Qaeda franchises whereby they become magnets for terrorists from elsewhere, and pretty soon we find that their ambitions and the risks that they pose go wider.

[Mike Gapes (Ilford South) (Lab/Co-op)]

The Prime Minister said that he was going to push the issue of terrorism on the agenda for the G8. Will he also raise it with the EU 27 and the NATO 28, and try to get better co-ordination between the United States Africa Command —AFRICOM—in Stuttgart and the European security and defence policies?

[The Prime Minister]

I will certainly take the hon. Gentleman’s advice, and he makes a good point. The reason for specifically mentioning the G8 is that in that slightly smaller forum it is possible to have an in-depth conversation with American, French, Italian, Canadian and other partners about what more we can do to thicken our various defence, security, political and diplomatic relations with countries in, for instance, north Africa, making sure that we do not all fall over each other in trying to do the same thing in the same country. We should be recognising that in some cases there are very strong British relationships that we should build on, but in others the relationships may be French, Italian or American.