David Blackburn

Cameron’s Libyan double standard

After the Libyan blood money scandal at the LSE, inquiries were bound to be made about other universities. Robert Halfon, the Conservative MP for Harlow, has exposed how Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) agreed to contracts with Gaddafi’s Libya worth at least £1,272,000.00. (He has since been threatened with a defamation suit for pointing this out, but that’s for another time.)

He raised the issue in parliament and the Prime Minister replied:

‘I think that there are lessons to be learned. As I have said, I think that it was right (of the previous government) to respond to what Libya did in terms of weapons of mass destruction, but I do not think that the way in which that response was handled was right. Too much credulity was shown, particularly over issues such as that of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the man
who was convicted of the biggest mass murder in British history. Universities will also want to ask themselves, as they are doing, some pretty searching questions about what they did.’

Indeed. Ever since Britain’s rapprochement with Gaddafi in 2004, there has been an exchange of pens and pills for cash and oil. Few questions were asked of the Gaddafi regime because Whitehall and Downing Street were confident in its commitment to reform. At the government’s invitation, many British businesses, including universities, were involved.

Despite David Cameron’s protestations, the policy survived last year’s change of government. On the 27 May 2010, the UK Trade and Investment (UKTI) arm of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and the Business Department issued a report, Doing Business With Libya, presumably as part of the coalition’s commerce-driven foreign policy. Owing to Libya’s current strife, the initiative has been closed, but residual traces of it remain. UKTI planned to hold a ‘UK Libya Educational Cooperation Seminar and Exhibition’ at Al Fateh University in Tripoli on the 8 – 9 March 2011.

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