How has the FCO managed the Libya and other emergency situations?

The only true test of how well the FCO has done is, of course, the absence or otherwise of shrill and ignorant moaning from the Daily Mail. So the FCO clearly passed the Tunisia and Egypt hurdles quite well. What, though, went wrong with Libya?

Basically, what happens once a decision is taken to plan for mass evacuation of British citizens? Roughly this.

First, people are urged to use commercial air flights or any other seemingly sensible route to leave the country. Hence in this latest one, even though many Brits were temporarily becalmed in the steaming filth of Tripoli airport waiting for the delayed FCO aircraft to appear, plenty of other Brits were quietly leaving Libya by land or otherwise as they could manage.

If commercial air-flights are suspended and/or insufficient, the FCO may decide to charter aircraft (using charter firms which DFID also use for getting emergency supplies round the world fast) to fly into the trouble-spot and airlift people out. If civilian flights are still flying, the FCO asks people to promise to pay a suitable economy fair payment to help cover the cost of this service.

If (exceptionally) commercial flights refuse to fly (maybe their insurance won’t allow it in certain specific circumstances) then military options are considered. But having military planes flying in raises all sorts of new problems and may well not be welcome to the suspicious local authorities.

In short, the FCO has an ‘escalating response’ to consular crises. This worked well in Tunisia and Egypt.

It went wrong in Libya this week partly because of sheer bad luck (one aircraft broke down, one had concerns about flying to Libya), but also because (I gather) the FCO system did not seem to respond to these difficulties ruthlessly enough. Too much Nu-Labourish procedure to take fast and tough (and expensive) operational decisions outside existing parameters, and maybe not the right level of urgency and ‘grip’ lower down the operational food-chain?

Something to be sorted out in slower time, as is now happening. Plus a new look at urgent back-up arrangements if the agreed charter plane conks out?

In other words, whereas in some consular emergencies the media rubbish the Embassy concerned, here it was HQ in London where things seemed to get stuck for a short while.

But only for a short while. Almost all Brits in easily accessible places were taken out efficiently once the whole operation got into top gear. The Embassy in Tripoli (like its counterparts in Cairo and Tunis) will have done a terrific job in highly stressful conditions to help make this happen. If you listen very very carefully you won’t hear the media praising their efforts.

As for vacuous observations like "Even the Turks did it quicker than we did", piffle.

One reason why the eg Turks can move so fast in a crisis like this one is that they are likely to have less stringent attitudes to and laws/rules about ‘risk management’ and ‘health and safety’ than we do.

Plus the risk to eg a Turkish aircraft in an Islamic society is objectively less than it is to a UK plane. In particular, what would the media be saying had the FCO somehow leant on a charter company to fly in quickly against its owners’ judgement, and that plane was then shot down by lunatic mercenaries or the local army as it took off, packed with British citizens?

Conclusion?

Very difficult judgement calls are needed by the FCO people on the spot and back at HQ when mass evacuations are required in sharp-end situations in problematic countries.

There is no point the media making a silly noise (other than their fevered requirement to sell a few more copies) about the FCO getting a plane into a trouble-spot some hours later than might have been the case, and/or ‘bribes’ paid by British officials to corrupt local air traffic people to allow an aircraft to leave.  

The key thing is not that sometimes things go wrong in these emergencies – rather that so often so much is accomplished so effectively (and relatively cheaply for the taxpayer). 

As Tolstoy famously put it:

Happy consular emergencies are all alike. Every unhappy consular emergency is unhappy in its own way.

Deal with it.

Oh. And remember that while we have the luxury of wittering on in a self-absorbed about such supposed problems, Libya is going to have to come to terms with the truth about stunning horrors like this one.