We had people working on this issue round the clock. My team lived and breathed Libya. As did I. I spent vast amounts of time on the situation.
Hugh Powell was probing for equipment for the rebels – radios, Land Rovers, armour. I was commissioning work on military options – precision targeting, the mentoring of NTC commanders. I was constantly trying to keep the pressure up, and was furious after advice said the MoD was trying to dial down the number of frigates, helicopters, Typhoons and Tornadoes.
I was exasperated that too many parts of the government and military machines seemed more concerned about a future Libya war inquiry than about the war itself.
Something had to change. George, Nick and I mulled over the idea of shifting our focus from the east and Benghazi to the capital, Tripoli, in the west. This had been inspired by the UAE and Qatar, which had led on supporting the militias there.
Our military was cautious, but went ahead. With our allies France, Qatar and the UAE we ended up steering the ramshackle Libyan rebel army from a secret cell in Paris, providing weapons, support and intelligence to the rebels planning an assault on Tripoli. This quartet of countries – known internally as the Four Amigos – focused on training, equipping and mentoring effective militias in the West.
Though this was known to NATO and the US, once again we were operating outside the traditional structures – pulling new levers all the time. Had we not done so, I don’t think there would have been the breakthrough that eventually came on 13 August, after NATO bombed Gaddafi’s military in the Nafusa Mountains. The rebels were victorious. The end was in sight.
On 20 August the rebels took back Zawiyah, the city Gaddafi had devastated months earlier and which had become a symbol of his brutality. The following day, they pushed through to Tripoli, and a euphoric crowd gathered in Green Square. By 28 August they had taken the capital, and Green Square was renamed Martyrs’ Square.
Within weeks the NTC was recognised as the new Libyan government, and on 15 September I visited Tripoli with Sarkozy. We had made a promise to each other that we would go together.
We went to Tripoli first. I’ll never forget going to visit Gaddafi’s victims in hospital (where we met an NHS doctor from Oswestry). It was a relief to see the hospital still standing. We hadn’t destroyed the critical infrastructure. I thought to myself: this country is going to survive; it’s going to work out.
We took a French military helicopter ride at fifty feet along the Benghazi waterfront. We spoke with a group of militia leaders with long beards and in three-piece Savile Row suits about the importance of compromise. We wove through the jubilant hordes to make our way to a stage in Freedom Square in Benghazi, and gave speeches as 10,000 people chanted ‘Cam-er-on’ and ‘Sar-ko-zy’. Someone there had even named their baby Sarkozy.
Still, we had no idea where Gaddafi was, until 20 October when he was found and executed. My tone was sombre: this wasn’t a time to celebrate, but to remember his victims, the people who rose up against him, and the many people from across the world who had risked their lives to help them succeed – so many of them British.
In the years following our intervention, elections were successfully held in Libya in 2012 and 2014. But the country then began to descend into factions, with the oil-rich east trying to break away from the west. Tragically, the extremist elements that were always there got a foothold, and the American ambassador, Christopher Stevens, was murdered in a September 2012 attack. There was a government misstep when it decided to bar all Gaddafi-era officials.
The UN failed to help reach a political solution, and for all the Western advice from our ambassadors and the heads of the UN support mission, little was heeded. This would enable the extremists of Islamic State to fill the vacuum in the important town of Sirte and continue to fight the moderates over Benghazi, and would also help to fuel the migration crisis. Eventually, in August 2016 Obama would end up committing more American resources to Libya in a bombing campaign against ISIS.
The problem, looking back, was that the UN-led political transition process focused too much on elections, and not enough on ensuring that the government had sufficient executive powers, critically over allocation of oil revenue and control of the militias.
Libya fast became a fragile state. Ministers lacked the authority to direct resources. International assistance had nothing to plug into. Worse, the transitional assembly gave the militias who had effectively defeated Gaddafi higher salaries than the government security forces – effectively bribing the militias not to attack them.
The militias became a tool for various factions to pursue their interests; time and again they were able to hold the government hostage to their demands, and they became the de facto police (or mafia) in ‘their’ bits of Tripoli and Benghazi. Which, in turn, left the field open for more radical elements to prosper.
With the UN process failing, I tried hard to find a political deal. I appointed Blair’s former chief of staff Jonathan Powell a special representative to Libya. I also tried to use the G8 summit in 2013 to get pol-itics and security back on track. But in the end, it wasn’t the lack of leadership that was the problem – it was the lack of people following any lead.
There are those who say our error in Libya was, like Blair in Iraq, to support the removal of a dictatorship without any idea, beyond some vague notion of democracy, what might replace it. They have got it totally wrong. We were supporting a credible alternative government: the best-organised rebel group of the Arab Spring, led by someone respected in the West, which offered the best possible chance for Libya’s future. This misconception is often accompanied by another: that we shouldn’t have intervened at all – and by columnists like Matthew Parris stating that ‘we would have done better’ to leave Gaddafi advancing on Benghazi. I shudder when I read those words in print, and I will be relieved to my dying day that we chose to stop Gaddafi reaching that city.
Clearly, had we had troops engaged on the ground in the country, we would have had a better chance of guaranteeing success. But there were never going to be British boots on the ground. The Libyan rebels didn’t want it, the world wouldn’t have voted for it, and it was explicitly ruled out by the UN resolution. The British people would not have accepted it.
Libya still faces troubles. But in many ways it came out of its conflict with better prospects than some other post-conflict states. It had a functioning, ‘moderating’ political body in which various political, regional and even religious factions were already used to using a political process to settle differences; it had access to huge amounts of (Libyan) capital for rebuilding; and it had a full range of ‘expert’ on-the-ground assistance thanks to the preparatory efforts led by DFID. None of those things has gone away. Nor has the sense of hope, with the anniversary of those revolutionary protests celebrated every year with rallies and concerts.
So I take heart. As one commentator put it, the intervention succeeded in the short term, failed in the medium term – but in the long term Libya still has a chance. It never would have had that chance if I had listened to official advice and other countries’ reluctance and decided not to take action, leaving Gaddafi in power. Just as I had hope in 1989 and in 2011, I still have hope for Libya.
22
Referendum and Riots
Should politicians hold referendums?
Margaret Thatcher didn’t think so. She said, quoting Clement Attlee, that they were ‘the device of dictators and demagogues’, and pointed to Hitler, Mussolini and Napoleon III’s use of plebiscites to confirm decisions they’d already taken.
Many people oppose the ‘device’ for less dramatic reasons. They believe that deciding upon specific issues is what we elect MPs to do.
My view is rather different – to the point where I put three country-defining issues to a vote (and a fourth on furthering Welsh devolution) during my premiership.
Of course, I believe in our parliamenta
ry democracy – one in which we elect representatives to take decisions on our behalf – rather than a Swiss-style direct democracy, where issue after issue is decided through popular ballots.
However, I also believe that there are some issues – particularly where Parliament is giving up its powers, or fundamentally rewriting the rules of our democracy – where there is a strong justification for asking voters to take the decisions themselves; otherwise politicians can end up giving away powers that are not theirs to surrender. In other words, it is not for those who govern to fundamentally change the rules around governing.
Britain has a precedent for deciding constitutional issues in this way. We had the votes on national and regional devolution in the 1970s and 1990s. We had the vote on Britain’s membership of the European Economic Community, or Common Market, in 1975 – until 2011 the only nationwide referendum ever held in this country. Countries around the world frequently determine such issues at the ballot box.
Not only are there past examples, there is a present compulsion for referendums. We live in an age when people fear that the rules are set by an elite from which they are excluded. A device that gives them control is more important than ever. As someone who believes in giving people as much power over their lives as possible, and who devolved power in many ways while in government, this is a natural instinct for me.
Of course, how these questions come to be settled in the first place often comes about through political necessity. The 2011 referendum on changing Britain’s voting system is one such example.
Far from overriding parliamentary sovereignty, this referendum was a product of that system. It could only take place because it had been approved by MPs. More than that, it had been demanded by those MPs in the first place, in that it was a condition set by the Lib Dems for entering the coalition. Though I didn’t want to replace the first-past-the-post system, and certainly not with the Alternative Vote system, I agreed that if the question was going to arise it should be put to the country. So that is how I ended up scheduling my first referendum for 5 May 2011.
The coalition programme had three legs: economic reform to deal with a broken economy; social and public service reform to deal with a broken society (though the Lib Dems would never use that term – they were too squeamish to admit that things were that bad); and political reform to mend our broken political system.
The pieces of political reform came together quickly.
In February 2011, MPs granted Conservatives our longed-for boundary review to reduce the size of the Commons and to make constituencies more equally sized. The average Conservative seat had 72,000 voters; the average Labour one 68,000 voters. But in some places it was far more uneven, with some seats having fewer than 65,000 constituents, and some over 85,000. Often, it took many more votes to elect a Conservative MP. ‘Equal-sized seats’ had been a cry for reform as far back as the Chartists in the 1840s. In the 2010 general election we’d have been just five short of an overall majority if there had been equal-sized seats. Rectifying that would increase fairness – and it would cut costs at the same time.
Another change was that petitions with over 100,000 signatures would automatically trigger a debate in Parliament. Then there was the power we gave to constituents to recall their MP if they were found guilty of wrongdoing (devised in the wake of the expenses scandal, this was criticised as timid and unlikely to be used; however, in the past three years it has already been triggered twice).
Then, in September 2011, the Commons passed the Fixed Term Parliaments Bill. General elections could no longer be called simply on the request of a prime minister: they would happen automatically every five years, unless two-thirds of the House agreed to hold one sooner. This was another long-standing Liberal Democrat policy, but the urgency now came from Lib Dem fears that the Conservatives might wait for an opportune moment, then collapse the coalition and seek a general election. The move made the coalition more stable. There was also the more profound advantage of making governments and prime ministers more focused on long-term decision-making, rather than trying to create a short-term set of circumstances that would help deliver a general-election victory.
I had always seen the force of the argument in favour of fixed-term Parliaments, and had said as long ago as 2006 that we should consider them. But it was the experience of politics between 2007 and 2010 that helped to convince me that the time was right for such a change. From the moment Gordon Brown cancelled his plans for an election in the autumn of 2007, I felt that he was trying to engineer favourable circumstances for a snap ballot.
The change meant removing from the prime minister the almost automatic power to call such a snap election (Theresa May would later effect a snap general election – but she had to ask Parliament to agree it).
The legislation for boundary reform also allowed for a nationwide referendum on whether Britain should replace its current voting system with the AV system. And electoral reform was the Lib Dems’ holy grail. The existing first-past-the-post system – each voter puts a cross next to one candidate, and the candidate with the most votes wins – seems fair in theory. But it works better for bigger parties than smaller ones.
I would always remember the 1983 election. The Social Democrats, led by the ‘gang of four’ who broke away from a hard-left Labour Party, had burst onto the scene and, in alliance with the Liberal Party, secured over a quarter of all votes, just a couple of percentage points behind Labour. Yet this translated to just twenty-three seats for the new party, compared with 209 for Labour. Even in 2010, with 24 per cent of the vote, the Lib Dems won just 8.8 per cent of the seats.
AV wouldn’t necessarily have rectified this. It wasn’t proportional – it didn’t directly link the number of votes cast to the number of seats shared out. It was preferential. Under the AV system, voters rank one, or some, or all of the candidates on the ballot paper. Those ballot papers are then put into piles according to which candidate is marked with a ‘1’. If no candidate gets more than half of all these first-preference votes, the candidate with the least first preferences is eliminated and their ballot papers’ second preferences are added to the remaining candidates’ piles. If that doesn’t bring anyone up to the 50 per cent mark, the next least popular candidate is eliminated and their ballots are shared out according to their second preferences (or their third, if their second have already been counted). On and on it goes until – bingo – someone hits that 50 per cent mark. This is very similar to the system that is used in the London mayoral and some local elections.
The benefit of this system, its proponents argued, was that unlike most systems of proportional representation, every MP would have a constituency, and every constituency an MP. And all MPs would require at least some measure of support from at least half of their electorate.
AV would benefit Nick Clegg, because the centrist, fall-back space his party occupied in British politics would attract the second-choice support of many Labour and Conservative voters. Those second choices could stack up and tip them over the line in marginal seats.
But in some instances AV could be less proportional than our current system. For instance, it is estimated that had the 1997 election been carried out under AV, the Labour landslide would have been even larger. Clegg himself even once called the system a ‘miserable little compromise’.
The reason for the Lib Dem switch to AV was Clegg’s political calculation that there was greater cross-party support for it. Labour had officially backed a referendum on AV in their manifesto and it would have more chance of becoming law than any other system.
This would turn out to be a miscalculation. Labour was split down the middle on the reform, and there was a deep hatred of the Lib Dems for their decision to go into government with the Conservatives.
While the promise of the referendum was what brought our two parties together, the manner of the campaign brought the coalition close to collapse. The first big AV argume
nt Nick and I had was over timing. Nick was determined to hold the referendum in May 2011, which was the first opportunity after the general election that coincided with local elections. Combining the polls would ensure a higher turnout and keep the cost of the vote down.
Backbench Conservative colleagues were strongly opposed to an early date for the referendum. Pointing out that the same Bill brought forward boundary reform got me nowhere with them. My party was determined that I shouldn’t accede to Clegg’s request for one simple reason: it was what Clegg wanted.
I got used to my party’s hostility when I gave ground to the Lib Dems – and to the Lib Dems’ hostility when I fought for the interests of my own party. It is the perpetual trap you’re in as a coalition prime minister. If you anger your partners, you don’t have a majority in Parliament. If you anger your party – especially when it’s the Conservative Party – you might not have a job.
From other quarters I was accused of being transactional about the voting system. This was unfounded. At Oxford I had studied under one of the great experts and supporters of reform, Vernon Bogdanor, and had scrutinised the different systems. I was hostile to anything that eliminates the sacred principle of ‘one person, one vote; one member, one seat’, such as proportional systems.
The fact that every MP is personally accountable to the people who elect him or her – they meet them regularly, they raise their issues in Parliament, they are effectively hired or fired by them every few years – is vital to our democracy. That was reaffirmed by my own experience. I knew West Oxfordshire like the back of my hand; I loved it and fought for it from my first days as a newly elected backbencher to my last as a retiring prime minister.
I was hostile to preferential systems like AV, because they are inherently unfair. First past the post means every person’s vote is equal. But AV makes some votes count more than others – literally, as supporters of unpopular parties end up having their ballots counted a number of times. We’d be giving all the Monster Raving Loony and British National Party crazies several bites at the electoral cherry, and letting them decide the outcome of elections by picking between the major parties, having already voted for their own.
For the Record Page 37