Murnaghan Interview with Liam Fox, former Defence Secretary, 28.06.15

ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: The Foreign Secretary has warned that the UK must continue to use its extensive resources to fight terror in the wake of those attacks on a Tunisian beach and I’m joined now by the former Defence Secretary, the Conservative MP Liam Fox, good morning to you.  While expressing your outrage that we all share at this attack, your thoughts on what kind of response there should be from the UK.  

LIAM FOX: Well we have a response at a whole different range of levels, we have our own security services in the UK trying to assess what the risks are, what individuals might pose a risk to security in this country.  We have obviously our security services acting overseas to try to identify risks, we have worked with foreign governments trying to cooperate and share information where that might be possible and then we have at the hard end if you like, a military battle against groups like ISIS in the region.  So at a whole range of levels we are operating and on top of that we’ve got the potential of using things like aid policy to try to diminish the reservoir from which the terrorists recruit these individuals.

DM: But do you think we have to up the blunt military response or is there a more subtle approach?  

LIAM FOX: They all have to be used.  The thing is that there is no silver bullet in all of this, people always want to know what is the response to an absolutely horrible event like the one that happened in Tunisia but there isn’t a single response.  We have to understand why this has happened and in understanding why it has happened, work out what our responses are for the future in a whole range of different policy ways.  

DM: Some are saying it is proof that the Arab Spring is really a failed project altogether.  You look at the migrants flooding out of Libya, the failed state that this is, Tunisia now teetering, two major terrorist attacks within the space of three or four months, Syria itself, the wellspring of ISIL.  

LIAM FOX: If you look at the Arab Spring I think there was a lot of misinterpretation about what it actually was.  I think politicians in the West wanted to believe that it was a spontaneous outcry for Western democracy when in fact it was a protest against rising food and fuel prices in those places and now we have got countries that have moved back from what was going to be a democratic model, some have embraced it but the important thing is that we give them the support to make their wider societies work. Democracy is not just the exercise of a ballot box, it’s about your rights to a free market, it’s about your rights to equal justice for the governing and the governed and the concepts of rights across race, religion and gender, all those things really matter.  We need to be ensuring two things, first of all that we diminish the pool from which these terrorists can be drawn that means giving people greater prosperity, greater freedom, greater rights to share in the things that we take for granted.  Secondly, we need to be giving their governments the help that they need to try to improve their own intelligence services and then we have to deal with the ideological battle, and perhaps that’s the most important of all.  This is the battle where there are those radicalised Wahhabi Salafist groups who are at the absolute extreme end of Sunni Islam who believe that they can throw away all the orthodoxies and are effectively divine instruments and therefore can do whatever they like and will get their reward in heaven.  We have to start to deal with some of the ideologies behind that because as long as people believe that they will be very vulnerable to radicalisation.  

DM: Until that happens do you think the physical threat is getting closer and closer to the heart of Europe?  Of course we’ve seen terror attacks, we saw one on the same day in France and we’ve had our own fair share here and of course we mentioned Libya there, one of the major routes for a flood of migrants, asylum seekers of all kinds and different reasons why people are coming but people are coming into the heart of Europe and the European Union saying they should be distributed.  

LIAM FOX: Let’s get the terror element in perspective first.  We have almost forgotten the hundreds of UK citizens who were killed during the troubles in Northern Ireland and the bombings in London, in Hyde Park, bombs in Birmingham and so in, in pubs and so on.  We’ve also forgotten about what happened in Europe in the last century, the Red Brigade.  Terrorism is not a new thing.  

DM: But some people are saying this is a threat to our very civilisation, you don’t go along with that?  

LIAM FOX: Well we’ve dealt with anarchist threats, communist threats, fascist threats, this is a very different type of ideological threat but it is an ideological threat and we need to deal with it, and I was watching one of your previous discussions on the programme with great interest, we do need to deal with information, with propaganda if you like, we need to understand that we need to see the internet not as a threat by which people can be radicalised but a means by which we can propagate our values and we need to look at programmes for example like giving women greater rights, we need to be pushing that because if you look at countries like Indonesia, an Islamic country where women are economically active, their profile is very different and it is the countries that are very repressive towards women which are one of the big problems so that is an area, a practical area, where we can be pushing for …

DM: But is it one more of the reasons why the UK needs to get control, full control of its borders within the European Union because Nigel Farage was on this programme and he was saying he thinks that terrorists are probably already in amongst those migrants sneaking in.  

LIAM FOX: Well that is very likely to be happening because of the sheer numbers involved.  Whether we have border controls as an issue of sovereignty and an issue of security are related but separate matters but I think what is very important is that we diminish the source of the problem because if we are trying to deal with it at border level we are already at the end of that sequence.  We need to be dealing with it earlier on, we need to deal with it militarily in dealing with groups like ISIS, we need to deal with it ideologically in the battle with Wahhabis and Salafists in the Arab region and beyond and we need to deal with it from an intelligence service at home and abroad.  

DM: Dr Fox, fascinating talking to you, thank you very much indeed, Liam Fox there.