Lord Balfe
Main Page: Lord Balfe (Conservative - Life peer)
Lord Balfe (Con)
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Howell for initiating this debate and welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, to her new role. She will probably find this place a bit more peaceful than where she came from, but I hope she enjoys it.
My connection with the Commonwealth goes back to the beginning of my working life, across the road with the Crown Agents for Oversea Governments and Administrations, a body sponsored by the British Government. During the time I was working for it, its main aim was to enable the colonies to emerge into the Commonwealth. It did a pretty good job. We are dealing with probably the largest international voluntary organisation in the world. As with many voluntary organisations, it is a very disparate group of nations—some would say too disparate.
We just heard from the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, who made many points about why the Australian deal is not a good one. I tend to think it probably is quite a good one, because at heart I am a free trader. If you reduce tariffs, you generally improve people’s welfare. The argument about free trade has been a feature of British politics for at least 100 years.
I counsel us against romanticising about the Commonwealth. There is a tendency—particularly among those who were not, let us say, 100% in favour of the EU—to try to look back to a time that was quite different, when there was a Commonwealth but Australia and New Zealand basically fed Britain. That time has long gone and will not come back. The sheep miles referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, are exactly what will stop it, because the market for Australian and New Zealand produce is now in the Far East and the Middle East. It is not in the United Kingdom and it is not going to be.
I see the future of the Commonwealth as a centre of soft power, an organisation that can give good advice, set standards, encourage good behaviour and, on occasions, assist other countries with limited amounts of money. It is not going to be a substitute for our aid budget or the international financial institutions we all subscribe to. Where it does have a future is as a centre of soft power, working with the British Council, the BBC and those other institutions that do so much to promote a good image of Britain and the Commonwealth in the world.