Lord Empey (UUP)

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Hoey, for securing this debate. This subject has been going around Parliament now for many years. I have had the privilege of being a member of a parliamentary group that tries to represent the interests of the victims of Libyan-supplied weaponry to the IRA. It is ably chaired by Andrew Rosindell MP. We have seen successive Foreign Secretaries, Treasury Ministers and officials, but the first and only time we felt that we were making some progress was actually when Boris Johnson was Foreign Secretary and he agreed to appoint an envoy. The expression on the faces of the Foreign Office officials sitting beside him told us that this was probably something that he had gone off and done on his own, but he then left the post and was replaced by Jeremy Hunt. Six months later, he came up with the Shawcross proposal, which has gone into the sand and remains top secret. The Treasury officials were the same. That group does not believe that the UK taxpayer should be paying compensation to the victims of Libyan-supplied weapons. The state of Libya, with Gaddafi as its president, decided to supply arms and weapons to a terrorist organisation operating in the United Kingdom. There is a clear, unambiguous line of responsibility from start to finish. Those weapons did a lot of damage in Great Britain and in Northern Ireland and without them, the IRA would not have been able to prosecute its campaign in the latter part of the 1980s and 1990s. It was the jewel in their crown. There are ways of using the frozen money—we have talked about this with officials—to build up schemes to ensure that revenue is provided to help victims. We will not go into the detail today, but if the Russian experience that we are going through at the moment had occurred when we were trying to make progress, we would have got a lot further. The Minister has to understand that the response has been a brick wall, not just from his party but from all parties. Many believe that Tony Blair persuaded Gaddafi not to develop nuclear weapons: the deal in the tent, there was some kind of payback. Your Lordships may remember Operation El Dorado Canyon, when Ronald Reagan used UK airbases to bomb Libya. That incentivised Gaddafi to do even more. With the “Eksund” and all the other things he did, he supplied a massive amount and was the engine room for the IRA in that period. I would say to the Minister that we talk about international law and the order—what order? Virtually nobody is paying any attention to it except us. The Chinese are not interested, the Americans are not interested, Russia is not interested, Iran is not interested. Who? These people in the state of Libya took a political decision to effectively attack the United Kingdom, and did it very effectively. Under these circumstances, we would be operating in the interests of our own people to ensure that we get as much compensation for these people as possible. They have suffered terribly. Other people have got it. It is not a case simply of finding that chicken nuggets in some eastern European country are not as acceptable as chicken nuggets here. That is the sort of trivia that we have reduced ourselves to in the courts. So I hope that the Minister can take seriously back to his department the idea that we can do this but the UK taxpayer does not have to bear the burden. On that, I think we can all agree.