Britain changes course to say Gaddafi should go

Throughout the uprisings of the last few weeks the British government, and its allies, have been adamantly refusing to say whether the various despots, dictators and Royals should stay or go. It was up to the people of those countries to determine their future, they said, perhaps ignoring the fact the regimes the protesters were trying to overthrow were heavily armed, often by us.

That changed on Saturday night as the UN Security Council adopted a resolution on Libya that could theoretically lead to Colonel Gaddafi facing charges in the International Criminal Court.

Suddenly European leaders such as Chancellor Merkel, and now Britain, decided it was time to say clearly Gaddafi must go. And now Hillary Clinton says the USA is reaching out to groups in the East of Libya – whatever that might mean. Here was William Hague’s explanation of why Britain changed its tune:

“…Throughout these crises in Egypt and Tunisia we’ve been careful to say it’s the people of these countries that must own the solution. But the people of Libya have risen up against Colonel Gaddafi, we have a country descending into civil war with atrocious scenes of killing of protesters, a government actually making war on its own people so of course it is time for Colonel Gaddafi to go…”

Is this an admission that they were wrong before on Egypt, Tunisia and the rest? Did people not fight and die there too? Or have we found out the line in the sand over which dictators must cross before they face demands from our government to step down. It is not enough, as we saw in Egypt, to engage in prolonged intimidation of a population, the deployment of armed police and troops, the unleashing of armed “civilian” gangs to attack and kill protesters. You have to kill hundreds, and lose control of whole cities rather than just parts of them.

There is another explanation that is equally possible – that this is, in truth, another case of Britain having to go where the Americans lead. Washington was never as ambivalent about Gaddafi as it was about Mubarak – and we saw the US Ambassador a week ago suggesting Britain had been wrong to give Gaddafi stature. It was never going to stand by for much longer and stay quiet on whether the Colonel should go. There was nothing to be gained in staying neutral, in the way there might have been with the other uprisings.

Maybe it is just naive to expect foreign policy to be consistent, maybe it is always a series of compromises based on the realities of life, alliances, economic interests and so on. But the inconsistencies are nonetheless striking – even down to how Britons being taken to safety on evacuee charters had to pay the British government to get out of Egypt but seemed to get free passage from Libya.

In Britain it is not just the government which has perhaps lacked a certain sure-footedness through these uprisings. Labour, in search of a post-Blair policy, has been trying to come up with a new set of tests too. In his first stab at it today in the Observer Ed Miliband declared “Where there are clearly demonstrated demands for democracy, we should avoid the appearance of ambivalence.” Though what a clearly demonstrated demand is can be argued over, and one has to ask is it the appearance of ambivalence we should avoid, or the ambivalence itself?

Ed Miliband’s second point renews his brother David’s original attack on David Cameron’s foreign policy : that “we should never reduce foreign policy to a narrow pursuit of commercial gain for Britain….That is why we should also examine our arms sales to ensure that UK weaponry is not used for the repression of people in those countries.” Though there is no admission that the Labour government allowed the export of “crowd control” equipment to these states, presumably with it never occurring to them the equipment might be used against internal uprisings.

He ends his argument with another barely disguised dig at Tony Blair : “the neocons were wrong to think we could impose democracy at the point of a gun. In this new era, soft power will often be a better way to achieve hard results. That is why support for civil society, the promotion of national assets such as the British Council and the BBC World Service, is so important. Our template should be the EU’s response to the democratic revolutions of 1989 which helped make change in eastern Europe irreversible, with economic aid, technical assistance and institution building.”

There will no doubt be queues of people wanting to point out the differences to 1989 so I won’t here, and the questionable appropriateness of economic aid to oil-rich states. The cuts Mr Miliband didn’t question were those to the Foreign Office itself – where hundreds of jobs are going. I’ve heard it suggested that one of the results of those cuts could be that it will be harder in future to hide away intelligence officers in embassies. I’m told in some embassies intelligence operations have been scaled down in order to concentrate resources on those countries like Pakistan where it is a clear priority. But all of that will surely have to be reappraised now – and with Britain’s foreign policy once again becoming more centre-stage than the government had perhaps hoped resources may have to be looked at again – at the World Service, the British Council, the Foreign Office and MI6!