Fox: Evacuations have been ‘very successful’
Liam Fox, defence secretary, spoke to the Today programme after the rescue operations in Libya:
“Over the last few days we’ve seen around 800 UK citizens helped to leave. Some have done so under their own steam, some have driven across the borders, some have taken civilian flights or civilian ferries, and, as you know, a number of military missions have been launched to bring them out.
“As far as we know we don’t have large numbers of British citizens who want to get out, however, there are British citizens who are still there – some who will be working in the security industry, some who will be working in the oil industry, who want to be there for the moment for reasons of employment – but circumstances change and we want to constantly monitor those.
“The foreign secretary has announced a review of how we carry out these in future and whether we should be as dependent, for example on charter, or whether we should be using the military earlier. But it’s worth again pointing out that we are still evacuating very large numbers of foreign nationals at the present time.
“The military is doing the job that it’s been asked to do and we will have to look in the future as I said and the foreign secretary has already announced that we will look to see what mix we will use in the future.
“As the prime minister said, we could have been quicker at the beginning, but I think what we need to look at now is the fact we have been very successful in getting our nationals out. And in fact, on HMS Cumberland, which is sailing now, only a quarter of the passengers are in fact British, the rest are foreign nationals who weren’t able to get out any other way.
“The view at the moment is that we should be putting all pressure on Colonel Gaddafi to leave, because he is a liability to his country and to his people. We want to make it very clear that he has no friends and to isolate him.”
