Immigrants Must Pass History Test To Earn UK Passport: Exam Will Cover Everything From Boudica To Churchill

Migrants will have to pass a quiz on British history and culture to receive a UK passport, David Cameron announced yesterday.

In a wide-ranging plan to ‘get a grip’ on our borders, the Prime Minister also urged the public to report suspected illegal immigrants to Crimestoppers.

And he admitted there was ‘discomfort and tension’ in some communities over the levels of migration.















Crackdown: David Cameron urged the public to report suspected illegal immigrants to Crimestoppers in a wide-ranging plan to 'get a grip' on our borders.













Pledge: The speech contained a suggestion to consider making forced marriage illegal - an idea critics claim could leave victims less likely to come forward.

Foreign nationals wanting to settle in the UK permanently have been required to sit a multiple-choice ‘Life in the UK’ test for the past six years.

But, in a highly controversial move, Labour ministers ruled it should not include a history section because there was ‘too much and it would not be fair’.

Instead, migrants are grilled on the structure of the European Union, state benefits, equal rights and discrimination.


















Yesterday, Mr Cameron said ministers would ‘revise the whole test to put British history and culture at the heart of it’.

Subjects to be covered include Roman Britain, Boudica, the Norman Conquest, Magna Carta, the Wars of the Roses, Elizabeth I, the Civil War, the Battle of Britain and Winston Churchill.

To make room, questions on the operation of the single market and on the differences between the Council of Europe, EU, European Commission and European Parliament will be dropped.

Making only his second major speech on immigration, Mr Cameron said he wanted to bring much-needed ‘fairness’ to the system.

‘While it’s crude and wrong to say immigrants come to Britain and take all our jobs, there’s no doubt that badly controlled immigration has compounded the failure of our welfare system and allowed governments and employers to carry on with the waste of people stuck on welfare when they should be working,’ he said.

The Prime Minister said that – in order to meet his promise to reduce net migration to the tens of thousands – the Government had to crack down on student visas, work visas, marriage, settlement and illegal immigration.

There were also proposals to make migrants pay a bond, possibly of thousands of pounds, before they are allowed to enter the UK. This would work to stop them disappearing into the black economy.

Plans were also unveiled to crack down on any migrant who owes the NHS £1,000 or more for non-emergency treatment.

They will either not be allowed a visa – preventing them from getting any follow-up treatment – or refused a renewal of their permission to stay.

Officials estimate the proposal to tackle ‘health tourism’ could save £20million over five years. The rules will not be applied retrospectively.

The speech contained a pledge to consider making forced marriage illegal – an idea critics claim could leave victims less likely to come forward.

A move to make firms count the number of foreign staff they employ was abandoned. Mr Cameron drew direct links between the culture of welfarism in Britain and the fact so many foreign workers, such as hard-working Poles, had secured jobs.

Shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper said: ‘Another week, another rewritten speech from the Prime Minister. Yesterday Downing Street said David Cameron would require companies to publish lists of foreign employees, and within 24 hours it has been dropped.

For Fox Sake, Call This Politics? That's Scandalous

Neither the idiot-abroad UK defence secretary nor scandal-mongering critics seem able to separate important public issues from personal sleaze.

There are, apparently, still a lot of ‘unanswered questions’ about the precise details of the Fox affair, involving UK defence secretary Liam Fox, his man-friend Adam Werritty and some murky meetings at the ministry and with foreign dignitaries. So, here are a few more to add to the list.










How could an allegedly senior Tory statesman be so unworldly and moronic as to imagine that it would be alright to take his bestest friend along on diplomatic jaunts pretending to be an official adviser, as if they were two little boys playing ministers and aides? And then to imagine, rather like that rugby-playing royal lackey, that if he simply denied it all, the video evidence would just go away?

On the other hand, the question is: how could the Labour opposition be so pathetic as to imagine that the way to criticise the Tory defence secretary is not to attack the international policies he is pursuing, but to trawl through his diary and Google photos for evidence of meetings with his chum at the MoD and elsewhere? Don’t they know there’s a directionless, disastrous war on – in fact two, in Afghanistan and Libya – with Fox as defence secretary in the political frontline? Did it never occur to the spineless Labour Fox-hunters that attacking the conduct of those foreign adventures might be more important than tracking his jollies around the world?

One possible answer for all these questions emerged when Fox, having insisted that he had done nothing wrong, came forward over the weekend to issue a half-hearted apology for, umm, doing nothing wrong but allowing others to imagine that he might have done. The defence secretary’s statement began by acknowledging that he had mistakenly allowed ‘distinctions to be blurred’ between his professional and personal affairs. Or as Conservative prime minister David Cameron put it, in attempting to defend his defence secretary on the TV news yesterday morning, ‘the personal and the political had become too entwined’.

Truer than they imagine, those statements describe not just Fox and his shenanigans with Werritty, but the entire British political class and its conduct today. Across the board, the line has become blurred between the proper public-political sphere and the sphere where things are private and personal, with damaging effects for both. This can help to explain both Fox’s bizarre antics and the opposition’s shrill reactions to them.

Spiked has often commented on the trend for public bodies and authorities to interfere in private matters, most recently through the politics of ‘nudge’. The flipside of this is the way that private and personal concerns have often come to dominate public debate.

As the horizons of political vision and debate have shrunk, public figures have come to stand not on their beliefs, but on their personal behaviour, PR image and ‘character’. Sleaze and scandal have replaced politics, with politicians more likely to be judged on their expense returns and mortgage applications than election manifestoes. The slogan ‘the personal is political’, once the preserve of the feminist fringe, has gone mainstream. All parties and leaders now try to give the personal touch (whether we want it or not) and sell themselves on their alleged integrity rather than their ideas.

The Tories are far from immune from this erosion of the distinction between the public and the private. Even the death of Cameron’s disabled young son in 2009, a personal tragedy, was turned into a public event with political consequences. Parliamentary democracy was suspended for the day, some Tory commentators claimed that this experience would give opposition leader Cameron a special insight into running the health service, and the New Labour government worried over whether the media coverage of his bereavement might boost the Tories.

So perhaps it is not surprising that even somebody like Fox, supposedly a traditional Tory right-winger, should apparently have lost his bearings and all sense of where the public stops and the personal starts. His admitted failure to distinguish between his personal relationships and professional responsibilities is symptomatic of a wider loss of a proper sense of statesmanship in Whitehall, where British leaders these days seem to have trouble understanding that they are supposed to be serving a greater cause than their own advancement.

Of course past statesmen and diplomats have been involved in far bigger scandals than Fox’s mundane meetings with his best man, but they still tended to retain more of a sense of who and where they were in the world. In 1963 John Profumo, the Tory secretary of state for war (the equivalent of Fox’s post today), was infamously forced to resign after he was revealed to have lied about his relationship with a call girl who also had an affair with a Russian attaché. But one cannot quite imagine Profumo thinking it was reasonable to carry on his private liaisons over his desk at the ministry. Yet Fox imagined it would be okay for his chum to drop in at the MoD without security clearance when he liked, and tag along to meetings with foreign dignitaries and businessmen at home and abroad, as if the secretary of state were a parish councillor visiting old dears in draughty church halls.

So Fox looks like an idiot abroad who apparently does not know the difference between a former flatmate and a serving official. However, the way that this less-than-earth-shattering idiocy has been turned into the biggest story in politics is a sign that the opposition has little more idea of the proper relationship between the public and the personal.

Ever since Tony Blair launched New Labour on a crusade against Tory government sleaze in the mid-1990s, scandals and issues of personal probity have become the basic stuff of opposition politics in the UK. Lacking any political alternatives, opposition parties have retreated to personalised scandals. This culminated in the all-consuming scandal over MPs’ expenses, which benefited no party and should have taught them all that democratic politics will be the loser when debate is reduced to the swapping of scandalous and sordid allegations.

Yet here is Labour, having learnt nothing, trying to make allegations of personal sleaze a main plank of its attack on the Lib-Con coalition government. If the left wants to get Fox – widely seen as a standard-bearer for Thatcherism – there is no shortage of weapons to use against the defence secretary. Apart from the mishandling of the defence cuts, there is the small matter of two wars that should be opposed. Afghanistan has been a 10-year disaster, going nowhere slowly. Libya, despite the government’s recent bravado over its ‘triumph’, is a misguided mission that should never have been started and the end result of which remains unclear (see The barbarism of buffoons).

Yet this week, on the tenth anniversary of the launch of the failed US-UK Afghan invasion, Fox was having to dodge questions, not about all of the spurious justifications governments have offered for the war, but about his pal’s bogus business cards.

Of course Afghanistan was New Labour’s war in the first place. And in opposition the party has backed Cameron over Libya, sharing the government’s delusions in the ability of Western intervention to save the world. With a stale consensus on such big issues, political conflict can be reduced to the relatively petty public-personal morass.

Hence for the Fox-hunters, it’s a case of ‘Don’t mention the wars – take aim at his appointment books and wedding photos’.

The end game for Fox remains uncertain, and who cares either way? In proper political terms it does not matter much whether he stays or goes. The more important damage has been done by the elevation of this petty scandal into a national furore, reducing the scope and scale of public debate still further, and further blurring the political line between important public issues and inconsequential personal affairs.

This sort of thing can no longer be seen as a distraction from parliamentary politics. In the absence of anything of more substantial, scandals and scandal-mongering have become the real stuff of British political life. If this is allowed to carry on, the writing is surely on the fake business card for the future of meaningful democratic debate. Shoot the Fox if you want, but haven’t we got bigger wars to fight?

UK Must Boost Defence Sales, Says Defence Secretary Liam Fox

Defence Secretary Liam Fox insisted Britain's arms export restrictions were among the world's toughest as he called for more UK defence technology to be sold abroad today.












He said "profit" and "market share" were not dirty words but stressed that the Government would not compromise its values by allowing weapons to be sold to repressive regimes.

Dr Fox spoke to the Defence and Security Equipment International exhibition at the Excel Centre in east London as protesters staged demonstrations against British arms manufacturers.

The Defence Secretary said: "The United Kingdom's export licensing regime is amongst the most rigorous in the world.

"Respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms are mandatory considerations for all export licence applications, which we consider on a case-by-case basis.

"When conditions change we act swiftly to revoke licences that do not meet our strict criteria - just as we did earlier this year as the events in the Middle East and North Africa unfolded."

He added: "We will not compromise our values. But let me be equally clear, we will continue to support our allies and partners, we will help with their security needs, and we will support businesses seeking to do that."

In April MPs accused ministers of misjudging the risk that British arms exports to countries such as Libya and Bahrain would be used to repress their own people.

The Commons Committees on Arms Export Controls disclosed that as recently as last year, UK firms were given licences to sell equipment ranging from small arms and tear gas canisters to armoured personnel carriers to countries in the region.

Dr Fox noted that British defence companies support 300,000 jobs across the country, but said the best way to sustain the industry in the long-term was by boosting sales abroad.

"For too long export potential has been ignored when initiating projects for the UK's own use. That needs to change," he said.

"Exportability needs to become ingrained in the requirement setting, commissioning and production processes - because only through exportability can risks and costs be shared in a viable way."

Dr Fox also warned that budget cuts meant the Government would be a "tougher, more intelligent customer" of defence firms in the future.

He said: "The pressure on the public purse means that now more than ever, value for money for the taxpayer must be demonstrable.

"Value for money is not about compromising your defence aim or compromising business viability - it is about realising those aims in a way that is sustainable for both customer and supplier. That balance has not always existed in the past."

Meanwhile, campaigners have won the right to protest against the Defence and Security Equipment International exhibition - one of the world's biggest arms fairs - after a blanket ban on marches in the area was lifted.

The prohibition came into force on September 2 as a response to concerns about a demonstration planned by far-right group the English Defence League (EDL) in the east London borough of Tower Hamlets.

But the Metropolitan Police applied for permission to vary the ban to allow an anti-arms trade march from Westminster to the Excel Centre to take place tomorrow after a threat of legal action from campaigners, according to solicitors Christian Khan.

Protesters say at least 14 delegations to the arms fair have come from countries defined as "authoritarian regimes" by human rights groups.

They have expressed dismay that those invited include officials from Bahrain, which has killed scores of citizens since protests broke out in February.

Matthew Knowles, spokesman for ADS, the UK's aerospace, defence and security organisation, said: "The defence industry directly employs over 110,000 people across the whole country and supports over 300,000 jobs in total, generating more than £22 billion for the UK economy in 2010.

"With tough, effective and industry-supported Government export controls in place, it is clear that defence is delivering for the UK economically while meeting the concerns of society."

When Dave Was Tapped Up By The KGB

Here's one for Robert Harris's next plotline: David Cameron has claimed that the KGB sought to sign him up as a double agent.


















Double agent: David Cameron (with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev).

Regaling students at Moscow State University this morning, the Prime Minister recalled his first visit to Russia as a student on his gap year between school and university in 1985.

'I took the Trans-Siberian Railway from Nakhodka to Moscow and went on to the Black Sea coast,' he said.

'There two Russians - speaking perfect English - turned up on a beach mostly used by foreigners.

'They took me out to lunch and dinner and asked me about life in England and what I thought about politics.

'When I got back I told my tutor at university and he asked me whether it was an interview.

'If it was, it seems I didn’t get the job.'

Quite how the KGB gags, if that's what they were, will go down with Mr Cameron's already prickly hosts remains to be seen.

Over breakfast (served with large quantities of alcohol, perhaps explaining Russian male life expectancy of 59), the PM and his policy advisers discussed how to approach the first visit by a British leader to Russia for six years.

The Prime Minister will not have been pleased by the headline on page one of this morning's Moscow Times: 'Kremlin Sees No "Reset" in UK Visit'.
The message from Sergei Prikhodko, Russian president Dmitry Medvedev's chief foreign policy adviser, could not have been clearer.



















Now and then: The Prime Minister on his visit to Moscow, left, and in an undated photograph, right, as he may have looked in 1985.

'No-one is expecting any breakthroughs, and in fact they are not needed,' he declares. 'Why fight? It is not necessary for us to have a "reset" with Britain. We will continue to work the way that we have been working in the past.'

Which, if he means what he says, means not terribly well, if at all. Officials admit Britain has had no formal contact at all with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin since 2007, when he made a cursory phone call to Downing Street to mark Gordon Brown's arrival as Prime Minister.

Mr Cameron acknowledges he is walking a tightrope on the visit, which, in what is becoming a trademark for his foreign visits, comes with a planeload of business leaders anxious to sign contracts in tow.

The PM does intend to make at least a passing public reference to the murder of Alexander Litvinenko in London - the only hostile nuclear incident ever to take place on British soil - which plunged Anglo-Russian relations to their lowest point since the end of the Cold War.












Poisoned: Alexander Litvinenko died in 2006, but Russia has steadfastly refused to extradite the prime suspect in the case, Andrei Lugovoy.

Russian dissident Litvinenko was poisoned with radioactive polonium-210 in London five years ago in what is alleged to have been a state-sponsored assassination.

But demands to extradite Andrei Lugovoy, the former KGB officer who is the chief suspect in the murder, will fall on deaf ears. Lugovoy, now a member of Russia's parliament, also had a message for Mr Cameron this morning.

'It's impossible to say who left the polonium,' he boasted from the comfort of a fishing trip in the Kamchatka peninsula in Russia's Far East.

But Mr Lugovoy does have a theory, which he is anxious to share. Litvinenko, he suggests, was involved in the trade of polonium and was killed not by the Russian secret service... but by MI6.

Back to Robert Harris!

Mikhail Khodorkovsky Urges David Cameron To Confront Kremlin On Human Rights

Russia's most famous prisoner of conscience has spoken out from behind bars to urge David Cameron to confront the Kremlin on human rights issues when the Prime Minister visits Russia next week.












Mikhail Khodorkovsy, the former head of the Yukos oil company.

In written comments passed to The Daily Telegraph from his prison in northern Russia, Mikhail Khodorkovsky said Mr Cameron should use the fact that top Russian politicians bank, own property, and educate their children in the UK to pressure the Kremlin into becoming "a modern European state."

"I would hope that the British Prime Minister will directly raise questions of corruption and the judicial system in Russia with President (Dmitry) Medvedev," the 48-year-old oligarch-turned-political prisoner wrote.

"The UK could let Russia understand that a country with such widespread corruption, the only G8 country where there are political prisoners, cannot be a fully-fledged and all-round partner."

His mother, Marina Khodorkovskaya, went even further. In an interview, she urged Mr Cameron to deny entry to Russian officials involved in her son's case and to freeze their UK bank accounts.

Mr Cameron is due to make a flying visit to Moscow on Monday during which he is expected to meet Mr Medvedev and Vladimir Putin, the prime minister.

He will be the first British leader to visit Russia since Tony Blair five years ago, and the first since the 2006 poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian spy and Kremlin critic, in central London.

The Prime Minister is aware of Mr Khodorkovsky's fate which has become emblematic of Russia's heavily politicised and selective justice system.

Designated as a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International, the former oil tycoon was Russia's richest man before he had a spectacular falling out with Mr Putin in 2003 over business and politics.

Arrested by masked men on an icy Siberian runway in his private jet that same year, he was later found guilty of fraud and given an eight year jail term after a trial that was widely viewed in the West as politically-motivated.

He spent much of that time in a grim Soviet-style labour camp 3,000 miles east of Moscow near China.

Yukos, his oil company, was swallowed up by the Kremlin while he languished behind bars, and in a second trial last year he was sentenced to a further six years in jail after being found guilty of the surreal charge of stealing oil from own company.

In his written comments from his jail in northern Russia, Mr Khodorkovsky said he wanted his own case to be a warning to British companies considering investing in Russia.

"It will be difficult for anyone to expect British companies to do serious business in Russia whilst entrepreneurs are factually subjected to a bureaucratic racket," he wrote.

Although Russia and the UK do in fact enjoy strong business links, political relations have stalled over differences on key foreign policy, security, business and rights issues.

Companies in the West are keen to tap into Russia's status as the world's biggest energy exporter but Russia's liberal opposition argues that Western politicians such as Mr Cameron need to keep reminding the Kremlin it must enact real democratic reforms if it wants large-scale investment.

Mr Khodorkovsky said he thought the UK could start by withholding the transfer of technology necessary for Russia's modernisation until the Kremlin changed course politically. He claimed that the UK had real clout with Russia.

"There is no question that such leverage does exist," he wrote. "The most influential people in Russia, those who in large measure determine the image and the fate of the country today, have vast business and personal interests in the UK. This applies also to a series of significant representatives of Vladimir Putin's team."

Speaking at a school outside Moscow that Mr Khodorkovsky originally set up for orphans, his mother Marina, 77, said she wanted Mr Cameron to raise her son's case with the Kremlin.

But she said she was looking for more that just rhetoric. "Words need to be backed with action," she said, urging the UK to impose visa and financial sanctions on Russian officials such as judges and prosecutors involved in her son's case.

"It is realistic and it would have an effect," she argued. "If the people in the second echelon of power beneath Putin understand that the higher-ups cannot protect them they will soon forget their loyalty to the system."

Clear-eyed despite her advanced years, she said that she feared that her son would not be released for as long as Mr Putin wielded influence in Russia. The Russian prime minister bore her son a personal grudge for publicly cutting across his political and business interests, she insisted.

"My aim is to live long enough to see my son freed," she said as tears formed in her eyes. "But I understand that the chances are getting less and less as I get older and older."

Libya: September 5 As It Happened

Minute by minute coverage from Libya as secret documents disclosed MI6's alleged involvement in the "rendition" of the leader of an opposition group.












Rebel reinforcements from Tripoli go through a checkpoint between Tarhouna and Bani Walid.












Rebels reinforcements from Tripoli celebrate as they arrive at a checkpoint between Tarhouna and Bani.












Abdelhakim Belhadj head of the Tripoli Military Council in the post revolutionary Libyan government.












A rebel fighter, left, checks a car at a checkpoint between Tarhouna and Bani Walid, Libya.












Rebel fighter Abdul Multab practices shooting at a checkpoint between Tarhouna and Bani Walid.












Al-Saadi Gaddafi, the son of Col Gaddafi.

Latest

23.45 That's all for tonight. For the latest Libya live updates see our Libya page.

23.42 A few more details on the remarks by Colonel Gaddafi's spokesman Moussa Ibrahim, who said the ousted dictator was in good health and in good spirits somewhere in Libya. Mr Ibrahim told Syrian-owned Arrai TV:

He is in a place that will not be reached by those fractious groups, and he is in Libya.

He said Gaddafi's son, Saif al-Islam, was also in Libya, moving around from one place to another.

22.53 Libyan rebel leader Abdul Hakim Belhaj claims British intelligence officers knew he was being tortured but did nothing to help him, the Guardian reported.

I couldn’t believe they could let this go on. What has happened deserves a full inquiry.

He said that the British visited in Tripoli after he was captured by CIA officers.

They came about a month after I was returned to Libya and they were very well briefed about LIFG [Libyan Islamic Fighting Group] members in the UK. They knew everything, even their code names. They wanted to know more details about the LIFG and also about the general environment elsewhere, al-Qaeda, that sort of thing.

22.42 Colonel Gaddafi is in Libya, in good health and in high spirits, his spokesman tells Arrai TV.

22.25 Libya's ruling National Transitional Council will not move from the rebel stronghold of Benghazi to the capital Tripoli until the whole of the country - including the Gaddafi bastions of Sebha, Sirte and Bani Walid - has been freed from the control of Gaddafi forces, the council's vice president Abdel Hafiz Ghoga told AFP.

20.05 Britain has re-opened its diplomatic mission in Tripoli after a team led by UK special representative Dominic Asquith arrived in the Libyan capital on an RAF flight - six months after closing its embassy at the start of the revolt against Colonel Gaddafi.

Foreign Secretary William Hague said:

The arrival of this team marks another significant step in the UK's relations with the new Libya, and reflects the progress the National Transitional Council has made in improving security and stability on the ground.












19.27 The UN Security Council is on Friday to discuss the launch of a wide-ranging mission to Libya to help tackle police reform, justice and election preparations.

The secretary general's special envoy, Ian Martin, is to report to members of the body on his visit to Libya, asking them to authorise an initial three-month mission, spokesman Ahmed Fawzi said.

But with leaders in Tripoli and Benghazi deeply reluctant to allow foreign troops onto Libyan soil, any proposal for a fully blown UN peacekeeping mission has been taken off the table, AFP reports.

18.44 The detention of thousands of suspected mercenaries and enemy fighters has left Libya's new government facing crowded prisons and concerns from rights groups that inmates may suffer unfair trials and mistreatment, writes Al Jazeera's Evan Hill.

18.25 Video: David Cameron tells MPs that Colonel Gaddafi "must face the law"



18.12 Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb - the terror group's north African branch - has acquired a stockpile of weapons during the turmoil in Libya, including surface-to-air missiles that are threatening air travel, the EU's counter-terrorism coordinator Gilles de Kerchove says.

Speaking at a Brussels news conference, de Kerchove said members of AQIP had "gained access to weapons, either small arms or machine-guns, or certain surface-to-air missiles which are extremely dangerous because they pose a risk to flights over the territory".

18.07 The deputy mayor of Tripoli says tap water is flowing again in most parts of the capital after a two-week outage that disrupted the lives of hundreds of thousands people, AP reports.

17.56 Frederik Pleitgen posts this picture on Twitter from the entrance to the besieged town of Bani Walid. Fighters surrounding the town are worried that Gaddafi loyalists will use its inhabitants as human shields.












17.36 Mary Fitzgerald tweets on body found buried in grounds of Tripoli factory.

17.17 Labour leader Ed Miliband praised the Government for pressing for UN action.

"If we had not acted, we would have been spending recent months not talking about the progress of our action in Libya but wringing our hands over slaughter in Benghazi, as we did after Bosnia."












Mr Miliband also backed plans for the Gibson inquiry to investigate claims that MI6 was involved in the rendition of Libyan terror suspects.

No part of the British state should ever be complicit in torture.

16.40 Mr Cameron said the key needs for Libya at the moment were temporary classrooms and housing.

16.05 His full statement can be viewed on the No 10 website.

16.00 Mr Cameron said it was the "Libyan people who have liberated Libya". He said removing Col Gaddafi from power "was a major achievement".

Many cynics proclaimed stalemate and asserted that Gaddafi would never be defeated.

The Libyan people proved them wrong. It was a unique set of circumstances and not something that we can or wish to repeat all over the world.

But I have never accepted the argument that because you can’t do everything, you shouldn’t do anything. Although the work is not yet done, the Libyan people can be proud of what they have achieved and we can be proud of what we have done to help them.

15.55 Libya is fully capable of "paying for its own reconstruction", he told Parliament.

Of course there is a role for foreign advice, help and support but we don’t want to see an army of foreign consultants driving around in four by fours giving the impression this is something being done to the Libyans, rather than done by them.

15.50 He said it had been shown that the British and Libyan security services had "became too close" particularly in 2003 after revelations were aired over the weekend about Britain's involvement with the regime.

He said the official inquiry led by Sir Peter Gibson will look at claims British security services had been complicit in forms of Torture "including rendition".

15.45 Mr Cameron said Britain's "special representative" John Jenkins was flying to Libya to "re-establish" full diplomatic relationships with the new government.

15.40 The Prime Minister said the new Libyan PM "has assured me" that Libyan authorities will "cooperate fully" on justice for WPC Yvonne Fletcher.

"I want to see justice for her fanily," he said.

"There is an ongoing police investigation, and the House will wish to know Prime Minister Jabril has assured me of the new Libyan authority’s intention to co-operate fully."

15.35 He said Britain would help in the task as Libyan "build that future". the long work of building a new Libya is just beginning.

We will not let up until the job is done. Those thinking NATO will somehow pull out or pull back must think again. We are ready to extend the NATO mandate for as long as is necessary.












David Cameron addresses Parliament.

15.33 Mr Cameron said Britain could not stand by and “watch a pariah state” continues. He paid tribute to the Libyans who had "taken their country back".

Britain could not stand by as Gaddafi slaughtered his people. Nor could we allow a failed pariah state festering on Europe’s southern border, with the potential to threaten our own security.

Mr Cameron said Britain would support the Libyan people in bringing Gaddafi to justice.

This is a man whose crimes are becoming ever more apparent every day and who is wanted by the International Criminal Court. There must be no bolt-hole; no pampered hiding place from justice.
He must face the consequences of his actions, under international and Libyan law.

15.30 David Cameron is about to address the House of Commons.

14.25 Members of Col Gaddafi's entourage, including his internal security chief Mansour Daw, have crossed the border into Niger, a Tuareg source has said.

The identity of the other individuals, believed to number around ten, who arrived in the northern Niger city of Agadez, escorted by a top Tuareg rebel leader, was not immediately known, AFP reports.

14.00 Despite the Libyan economy being ravaged by war, it is stable, with inflation under control and no insurmountable problems, the country's interim economics minister has claimed.

Despite severe shortages of fuel, water and labour, Abdullah Shamia said the inflation rate remained under double digits, with no sign of price increases that could decimate household finances and cripple the country's economic recovery.

According to AFP (Via the Egyptian Gazette) he told reporters in Tripoli.

"The general economy is relatively stable. Prices are generally stable, there is no hyper-inflation although there are price increases for some goods."












David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy in Paris last week for the conference on Libya. On Monday the PM's spokeman said the Gibon's inquiry was "well placed" to look at new torture allegations.

13.45 Jack Straw, who was Foreign Secretary at the time of some of the events discussed in the documents.

Asked about the torture claims, told BBC Radio 4's World at One:

These allegations must be examined in very great detail by the inquiry under Sir Peter Gibson. It is very important that they should be.

The position of successive British governments, not least when I was Foreign Secretary, was very clear and that was that we were opposed to unlawful rendition, we were opposed to any use of torture or similar methods. Not only did we not agree with it, we were not complicit in it and nor did we turn a blind eye to it."

Mr Straw said that a report by the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee concluded in 2007 that Britain was not involved in unlawful rendition of terror suspects.

But he added: "No Foreign Secretary can know all the details of what intelligence agencies are doing at any one time.

That is why it is important that these allegations are thoroughly examined by Sir Peter Gibson's inquiry."

13.30 Ukraine has said that Libya's new rulers detained 23 of its citizens who had been working in the oil sector, reportedly on suspicion they were snipers for fallen leader Moamer Kadhafi.

Foreign ministry spokesman Oleg Voloshyn, quoted by the Interfax-Ukraine news agency, described those detained as "civilian specialists" working in the oil sector.

Unfortunately, we must confirm that 23 Ukrainian citizens have been detained in Libya.

13.35 Following on from Chris Hope and Mary Riddell's scoop this morning, quoting DPP Kei Starmer as saying he wants the Yvonne Fletcher suspect tried at the Old Bailey, Paul Waugh, editor of Politicshome.com, tweets:

"Ex-DPP Lord MacDonald says Yvonne Fletcher killer shd be tried at OldBailey. Adds "it could happen'."

13.30 Tripoli rebels sport Hollywood looks despite the chaos, as fighters enjoy their moment in the limelight while not forgetting to look good for the cameras, reports the BBC, in an interesting feature.

13.20 Hugo Chavez, Venezuelan President, has said the best thing for Col Gaddafi would be for him to die fighting after he was asked if he would give asylum to the Libyan leader.

Chavez, speaking on state television, said he thought Qaddafi is “probably” still in Libya and that he will “resist until the end", according to Bloomberg.

13.15 NATO's mission in Libya has moved significantly closer to success and will end soon, the military alliance's secretary general said on Monday.

Anders Fogh Rasmussen told a news conference in Brussels that while he could not give a precise date for the mission's end, "I believe it will come soon".

Our operation to protect civilians has moved significantly closer to success, but we are not there yet.

13.00 Further to Rob Crilly's analysis earlier (0955), Col Ahmed Omar Bani now says he believes Gaddafi has fled the country. It comes as rebel reinforcements arrived outside one of Col Gaddafi's last strongholds in Libya, even as the forces arrayed against the toppled dictator gave the town a chance to surrender and avoid a fight.

Thousands of rebels have converged on the desert town of Bani Walid, southeast of Tripoli as the dictator remains on the run.












Anti-Gaddafi fighters stand on an SA-5 SAM missile in Burkan air defence military base, 70 kms from Bani Walid.

12.40 The United Nations is ready to assist Libya's new authorities in their preparations for elections, UN envoy Ian Martin told reporters in Tripoli on Monday.

The special adviser to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon arrived in Tripoli on Saturday for talks with the local authorities on how the United Nations can help them in the months ahead.

He landed at a military airbase in the capital, after the UN chief said the world body was ready to assist in re-establishing security following the nearly seven-month uprising that ousted Col Gaddafi.

He said it was "too soon for details" on how the transition would unfold as decisions regarding the electoral system, the establishment of an electoral commission and other technical details have yet to be determined, AFP reports (Via Bangkok Post).

Meanwhile the country faces a key challenge in establishing a law and order system that respects human rights, the UN envoy said.

"One of the most important challenges is the full restoration of public security in the hands of a police force which in future will respect human rights rather than be part of a system that violates human rights," he said.

Another priority, he said, would be the reform of the prison system in order to avoid "arbitrary" detentions and ensure those who have committed a crime are prosecuted within a "legal system that protects their rights".

12.30 Jihadists among the Libyan rebels revealed plans last week on the Internet to subvert the post-Moammar Gaddafi government and create an Islamist state, according to U.S. intelligence agencies.

U.S. officials said spy agencies are stepping up surveillance of Islamist-oriented elements among Libyan rebels.

The Washington Times reported that a government report, circulated last week, said extremists were observed “strategising” on Internet forums about how to set up an Islamist state in Libya after the regime of Col Gaddafi is defeated. The unclassified report stated:

Several forum participants have suggested that, following a transitional stage, the battle should turn against secularist rebels and members of the [rebels’] Transitional National Council.












12.06 An inquiry looking into allegations of UK complicity in the mistreatment of terror suspects today announced it will consider fresh claims relating to links between Britain's intelligence and security services and Libya.

Documents discovered in Tripoli following the fall of Col Muammar Gaddafi's dictatorial regime appear to suggest that the UK traded information with Libya in return for intelligence extracted from terror suspects under interrogation in Libyan prisons.

Prime Minister David Cameron's official spokesman this morning said that Sir Peter Gibson's inquiry was "well-placed" to look into the new allegations.

And the Gibson Inquiry - initially set up to look at cases of British nationals held at Guantanamo Bay - released a statement to say that it will "be considering allegations of UK involvement in rendition to Libya as part of our work".

Mr Cameron is expected to be questioned about the links of MI5 and MI6 with the Gaddafi regime when he addresses the House of Commons on Libya this afternoon.

12.05 Major General Nick Pope, the Chief of the Defence Staff’s Communications Officer, said in an emailed statement:

British aircraft were again in action yesterday over Libya, as part of NATO’s Operation Unified Protector, mounting a long range mission against Sebha and conducting strikes on Qadhafi’s troops at Sirte.

A formation of Royal Air Force Tornado GR4s took off from RAF Marham in Norfolk on Sunday, and, flying south to the Mediterranean, rendezvoused with allied aircraft to lead a long range strike mission against a group of military communications installations that form a key part of the former regime’s major headquarters complex at Sebha, in the Sahara.

The RAF aircraft launched a large salvo of highly accurate Storm Shadow stand-off missiles against their targets. Meanwhile, RAF Tornados and Typhoons based in Italy at Gioia del Colle helped NATO maintain armed reconnaissance patrols over Sirte, and during the evening our aircraft successfully attacked an ammunition depot nearby, as well as a self-propelled artillery piece and an armed pick-up truck, using Paveway and Brimstone guided weapons.

11.20 The Gaddafi regime warned of 'holy war' if Lockerbie bomber died in Scottish jail, reports Thomas Harding. The dictator warned Whitehall officials that Britain would face the retribution of "holy war" if the Lockerbie bomber died in prison.

Other documents found in the abandoned British embassy in Tripoli show concerns that there would be "dire consequences" for relations if Abdelbaset al–Megrahi died in his Scottish jail cell. He was released in August 2009.












Rebel reinforcements from Tripoli go through a checkpoint between Tarhouna and Bani Walid (Picture: AP)

11.15 Ukraine said it is checking reports that the newly-empowered rebels in Libya have arrested 19 Ukrainians on suspicion of acting as mercenary snipers for Col Gaddafi's regime.

The group, who are being held in Tripoli, have strongly denied the allegations. They insist they were simply expatriates working in the Libyan energy sector before the fall of Kadhafi's regime.

Ukrainian foreign ministry spokesman Oleg Voloshyn told the AFP news agency:

We are checking this information. The Ukrainian embassy in Tripoli is in contact with the local authorities.

11.10 Many in Manchester's community of about 5,000 Libya exiles now now making plans to go back and help directly in what may be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reverse decades of decay in their oil-rich, underdeveloped homeland.

Hundreds have also sent aid, or seen their husbands and brothers go back to join the uprising as Libyan exiles expect better days, the AP reports (Via Yahoo!).

These are some of the high hopes held by Libyan exiles and their supporters in Manchester, home of Britain's largest Libyan community, and in other English cities now that Col Gaddafi is on the run and his power gone.

11.00 Col Gaddafi's dictatorship likely wouldn't have survived for more than four decades without the sea of dictators all around, protecting one another and working together to silence dissident voices, the AP say in a feature (Via MSNBC) about how he "leaned on Arab allies to stay in power".

10.55 A pragmatic Rob Crilly, usually based in Pakistan tweets: "Getting to the stage where I might have to start looking into where I can watch the rugby world cup in Benghazi."

10.45 Libyan forces are awaiting orders to storm a desert town held by pro-Gaddafi fighters after negotiations failed to dislodge them from one of the deposed leader's remaining bastions.

Military units under Libya's interim council are trying to winkle out of Bani Walid as well as the coastal city of Sirte and a swathe of territory stretching far into the desert interior, Reuters reports.

Mohammed al-Fassi, a field commander for the National Transitional Council (NTC), said outside the town.

The door is still open for negotiations. Our offer still stands.

The offer is that people who committed crimes in Gaddafi's name will be put under house arrest until the new government is formed. Some of them have accepted this but others said no.












Rebel fighter Abdul Multab practices shooting at a checkpoint between Tarhouna and Bani Walid.

10.40 Rebel reinforcements are arriving outside one of Col Gaddafi's last strongholds in Libya, even as the forces arrayed against the toppled dictator give the town a chance to surrender and avoid a fight.

Thousands of rebels surround Bani Walid, a desert town southeast of the capital, AP reports.

A small rebel convoy arrived Monday at a checkpoint about 40 miles from Bani Walid. Ismail al-Gitani says the fighters were part of a larger force he commands and that he was ordered to reinforce the northern approaches to Bani Walid.

He refused to say how many fighters he had brought. Another rebel commander, Mohammed al-Fassi, says the door is still open for negotiations over the town's surrender

10.30 The BBC's Nick Lawrence Tweets that there are "no plans for any official comment from #MI6 regarding their collusion with the #Gaddafi regime. #libya"

10.20 Further to our post at 9.25 Prof Philippe Sands QC, director of the Centre on International Courts and Tribunals at University College London, said the veracity of the information in the papers remained to be determined.

But it was "an indication of high-level British involvement in the transportation of an individual from one area, Hong Kong, to Libya, directly or indirectly, and that plainly raises the most serious concerns about compatibility with English law".

He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme:

The real heart of this issue is the question of who knew what when and who signed off when. And when we get intelligence sources saying there was high ministerial sign off as early as March 2003, the question really arises: who signed off?

On the legislation that applied at that point, this would have to have been signed off either by the Foreign Secretary, the Home Secretary or Number 10. The inquiry that has been set up under Sir Peter Gibson is really going to have to get to grips with this.












Abdelhakim Belhadj head of the Tripoli Military Council in the post revolutionary Libyan government was claimed to have been tortured.

Kim Howells, a former chairman of the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee, said officials had been satisfied, after its own extensive inquiries, that there had been no illegal activity by UK intelligence services.

He also told the programme:

When we looked very, very hard at these allegations of rendition we did not find that the intelligence services were guilty,.
We were absolutely satisfied that there had been no involvement in illegal rendition of detainees by the British intelligence services and I don't believe that they did that.












Thousands of abandoned anti-personnel mines, loose and in crates, lie in a disused industrial area close to the Khamis Brigade Barracks on the outskirts of Tripoli (Picture: HEATHCLIFF O'MALLEY)

10.05 China has offered huge stockpiles of weapons to Col Moamer Gaddafi during the final months of his regime and held secret talks on shipping them through Algeria and South Africa, it was claimed.

State-controlled Chinese arms companies were ready to sell weapons and ammunition worth at least $200 million (£124.02 million) to him in late July, despite UN sanctions.

The claims were made in secret documents obtained by Canada's Globe and Mail newspaper.

Omar Hariri, chief of the transitional council's military committee, reviewed the documents and concluded they explained the presence of new weapons on the battlefield.

Beijing later denied it provided the Gaddafi regime with weapons in its final days, but said Libyan officials had visited China in July for talks with "interested companies".

10.10 Following on from that story Richard Spencer has discovered a huge Gaddafi weapons dump left unguarded in the capital, Tripoli.












Khamis Gaddafi, the Libyan leader's most feared son, has been confirmed dead, according to the NTC.

10.00 Libya's rebel leaders say they were certain that Khamis Gaddafi, the youngest son of the vanquished dictator, was dead after a week of rumours that he had been killed in a heavily armed convoy close to the town of Tarhouna, south-east of Tripoli.

If true, his death would be the highest-profile casualty among regime loyalists and a bitter blow to the besieged Gaddafi strongholds of Sirte and Bani Walid.

Rebel leaders had avoided publicly confirming the death of Khamis for fear of repeating their humiliation when they claimed to have captured another son, Saif al-Islam, before he re-emerged barely 24 hours late.

09.55 Here is some interesting analysis from Rob Crilly, our man in Benghazi.

If you wanted to give Colonel Gaddafi every chance to escape, here's what you would do:

Sweep into Tripoli in a disordered rabble, failing to secure entry and exit points, charging straight for his fortified compound, then - with the enemy on the run - stop, hold your positions and negotiate for each further loyalist stronghold in a stop-start process that is still under way a fortnight later.

That is pretty much where we are today. If you wanted me to place a bet, I'd put money on Gaddafi already having left the country.












Tony Blair meets Libyan leader Col Gaddafi at his desert base outside Sirte south of Tripoli in 2007.

09.50 Chief negotiator Abdullah Kanshil says talks between Bani Walid's tribal elders and representatives from Libya's interim government have ended without agreement.

Forces of Libya's interim ruling council are poised for an assault on the desert town of Bani Walid, after negotiators failed to persuade Muammar Gaddafi loyalists to abandon one of their last remaining bastions.

The town is one of just a handful of areas in Libya still under the control of Gaddafi loyalists after a six-month rebellion ousted the leader from Tripoli last month. Outside the town, a negotiator for the National Transitional Council forces now in control of the country said talks with tribal leaders were over, adding that it would be up to the NTC to decide what to do next.

There has been speculation from NTC officials that members of Gaddafi's family, perhaps even the former Libyan leader himself, may be hiding there. No comment was available from the other side.

09.45 Chief negotiator Abdullah Kanshil says talks between Bani Walid's tribal elders and representatives from Libya's interim government have ended without agreement.



09.35 As his morning briefing returns, Benedict Brogan, our Deputy Editor, notes that one question David Cameron might want to address with his statement on Libya is what the Government is doing to investigate the links between MI6, the British Government and Colonel Gaddafi's regime in Libya.

This Government obviously cannot be blamed for these queasy links, but the depth of cooperation might make it hard to ignore the issue, especially as more documents emerge from Gaddafi's still-smouldering palaces.

09.32 David Cameron, the Prime Minister, will update MPs on the situation in Libya in an oral statement to the House of Commons at 3.30pm today.

09.30 Britain's top prosecutor has said he wants the chief suspect in the WPc Yvonne Fletcher murder case to be tried in the Old Bailey. Keir Starmer, the Director of Public Prosecutions, said that in his view "the case should be tried here in London".

However, Mr Starmer, who heads up the Crown Prosecution Service, said that more evidence was needed before any charges could be made in the case.












Yvonne Fletcher and Matouk Mohammed Matouk.

09.25 MI6 rewarded Libyan intelligence for their co-operation after ties between the countries were restored with the "rendition" of the leader of an opposition group who later claimed he was tortured in custody, documents found in Tripoli show.

A senior officer in MI6 wrote a congratulatory letter to Moussa Koussa, then head of Libyan foreign intelligence and later foreign minister, on the safe arrival from Malaysia thanks to British and American intelligence of a man known as Abu Abdallah Sadiq.

That is the nom de guerre of the leader of the then banned Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, Abdelhakim Belhadj, who is now head of the Tripoli Military Council in the post-revolutionary Libyan government and a key western ally.

The letter, from Mark Allen, head of counter-terrorism at MI6, said:

This was the least we could do for you and for Libya to demonstrate the remarkable relationship we have built over recent years.

I am so glad. I was grateful to you for helping the officer we sent out last week.

09.20 Tony Blair's close relationship with one of Col Muammar Gaddafi's sons - Saif al–Islam - who is now being hunted for possible war crimes, is highlighted in previously secret documents discovered in Libya.

Thomas Harding, our defence correspondent, writes that the new evidence, which will further tarnish the former prime minister's image following his dealings with Libya, shows that he helped Saif al–Islam Gaddafi on his allegedly plagiarised PhD thesis.












09.15 Our main Libya story this morning is one from Richard Spencer, our man in Tripoli.

He writes that secret files found in a Tripoli intelligence service building have disclosed an Alleged Libyan extremist who sought political asylum in Britain regularly travelled to Iran from 2002 to provide forged documents to extremists linked to al-Qaeda.

The documents, seen by The Daily Telegraph, unearth British intelligence suspicions about links between Iran and al-Qaeda dating back almost a decade.

Other details to come out of the documents, sent by MI6 and found in the office of the former head of foreign intelligence and later foreign minister Moussa Koussa, who defected in March, include the revelation that Britain had begun co-operating with the Chinese security services on Islamic extremists.

09.10 Good morning all. Welcome to our live coverage of Libya on Monday, September 5.