Grass Root Tories are against intervention in Libya. No Lib Dems vote against the bill.

I was going to write a blog on Rebecca Black. Maybe I still will later today but in all honesty I’m just putting off cleaning my apartment. It needs a damned good hoover and the kitchen is a tip. I need to do this tonight – after I write this blog. I need to. I need to.

I clearly digress.

Across my twitter feed I saw a link to a piece on Conservative Home about the vote yesterday where only John Baron MP from the party voted against the bill to support and actively back UN Security Council Resolution 1973 yesterday. His opinion seems to have resonated with the grass-roots as looking at the comments they are nearly all in favour of letting things be and allowing Gaddafi to do what he wants. This surprises me in one way but it doesn’t in another.

With harsh times at home people are starting to not care about people overseas. They seem to think that it’s dreadful what is happening in Japan and that they want the Libyan rebels to win but they don’t want to actually do anything about it. We have enough problems at home people say. People think like Iraq it is about oil which is hilarious. If it was about oil we’d let Gaddafi win and keep our oil interests quietly without drawing any attention. We are not putting in an invasion force and will not be divvying up Libya for our own interests. This is purely an intervention to stop mass genocide, which surely is not a bad thing?

But people say it is a civil war so why are we getting involved? They think that unless it is to do with ourselves then we shouldn’t batter an eye-lid. I seem to recall we joined two World Wars when a country wouldn’t remove their invading troops from Belgium and Poland respectively. Neither Poland or Belgium are us. They may not have been civil wars but they didn’t directly affect us. So maybe we should step in when other countries are getting invaded but civil wars and a leader pulling off mass-genocide of his own people is fine?

There was a long debate on a Facebook Page I’m on with many Lib Dems. One of them is Polish. She said that violence never solved anything and we should never be involved in violence. She was asked how she felt about us joining WWII when Germany refused to withdraw their troops from Poland and she said se would always be grateful but that was seventy years ago and we should have learned that violence is not the answer by now. In a perfect world she is right but the world we live in is clearly not perfect.

For example if in the 2015 General Election Labour win but David Cameron will not give up the government and overthrows the Queen to become Head of State and the country revolted trying to overthrow a corrupt PM and he was killing everyone who disagreed with him being the leader of the country, would we want help from the rest of the world to install proper democracy again? Yes I think we would. Just because these events are going on in another country then we shouldn’t just ignore it.

Whilst atrocities are taking place in other countries, Yemen, Bahrain, Zimbabwe and we aren’t doing anything militarily there does this mean we shouldn’t do something in Libya? Just because you can’t do something every time doesn’t mean that when you can you shouldn’t. This resolution went through the UN Security Council and neither Russia or China used their veto. The Arab League and Gulf Council also back the resolution. So this has very broad support across the globe.

I’m no David Cameron fan but I do think he has held himself well in these challenging circumstances. I’m not sure Ed Miliband would have been as good. Gordon Brown I suspect would have been very wary of taking part as well.

Sometimes you just have to do what is right. Protecting innocent people and the right to free speech is right.

As a footnote no Lib Dem MPs voted against the adoption of the resolution. So unlike Iraq where the party had very public misgivings about the invasion, this time with the UN Security council backing they are ok to save lives. Good for them. No surprise that Caroline Lucas voted against the bill though.

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