Commonwealth

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Thursday 17th October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord whom I follow on his choice of subject today and of course issue the same congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Luce, who comes from a long tradition of family service to the Crown and to the Commonwealth overseas. I think that he is himself the last member of the Overseas Civil Service to sit in Parliament—I notice him nodding—and he was exactly the right person to open this debate.

Four years ago, I closed my speech in a debate on the Commonwealth initiated by the noble Lord, Lord Sheikh, with reference to the career of a Mancunian non-conformist missionary who had devoted his career to teaching the Admiralty Islanders the commandments of God and the laws of cricket. I do not propose to repeat that today, but his sporting avocation is a key to the Commonwealth. I offer a coincidence of a startling and anticipatory kind. Our Library’s well balanced brief tells us that Lord Rosebery, in 1884, made the first allusion to the Commonwealth of Nations. Simultaneously, at the Oval Test in 1884, the English wicket-keeper, Alfred Lyttelton, achieved what remains the greatest bowling feat by a wicket-keeper in Test cricket. With Australia at 532 for four, he took off his pads and took four for 19, bowling underarm. Lyttelton’s relevance does not end there. He was Secretary for the Colonies—note the portfolio—in Arthur Balfour’s Administration and remains the only British Cabinet Minister ever to have played in an Ashes Test. Cricket remains a good bond and omen. I shall return to cricket in my fourth minute.

This debate has been overshadowed by the dilemma of the location for CHOGM when the host country is still being investigated for the origins of past tragedies. I imagine that most of those taking part in this debate will want to declare where they stand on the dilemma. I ought, in that context, to declare an historical interest in that my brother is a former executive vice-president of the Commonwealth Magistrates’ and Judges’ Association. There is something Shakespearean, not to say Sophoclean, about the location dilemma, and my interest is in damage limitation, perhaps leading to the ground hills of a solution, the die seemingly having been cast as to the location. The Canadian leadership will still be metaphysically present because of its financial conditions, but how the Sri Lankans play their hand matters more than the views of the rest of the Commonwealth, although we have clues as to the sensible way that our hand will be played.

My personal particular hope is derived from my experience when the late, great Sir Keith Joseph delegated to me the responsibility of representing the United Kingdom Government at the Commonwealth Education Ministers’ Conference in Nicosia in 1984 and at the subsequent meeting in Sofia in 1985, which Sonny Ramphal sandwiched into the margins of the UNESCO meetings in Bulgaria that year. The agenda was dominated by the United Kingdom having imposed full cost charges on overseas students. It was effectively a rerun of the battle of Rorke’s Drift, with us cast as the garrison and everyone else except the Canadians and the New Zealanders playing the Zulus.

What was striking, and what I hope can be repeated in Colombo, was the astonishingly good humour with which the action was played out. The British ambassador in Sofia, who joined our delegation there, said that it was his first experience of a Commonwealth occasion and that it was unique in its friendliness. As to the verdict on the dilemma, I revert to the spirit of the time-honoured mantra of all cricket umpires that, at this stage, we should give the batsman at the wicket the benefit of the doubt and thus that, in that spirit, the match should go on.

Syria

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Monday 20th May 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Warsi]

Qatar and Saudi Arabia have both been part of many of the negotiations, including the Friends of Syria discussions which took place earlier this year. Radicalisation, extremism and the commitment of the Syrian national coalition were a big part of those discussions. The countries which form the Friends of Syria stand by those requirements not to support and foster extremism and radicalisation. There is a huge discussion going on at the moment about what inspires radicalisation and extremism. From a domestic perspective, the ideological basis for radicalisation can take two completely different forms. On the one hand, western intervention in Muslim countries can be seen as encouraging extremists to go out and fight, but there is also growing radicalisation and extremism on the back of what is seen as western inaction while many Muslims are being slaughtered in Syria. There is an argument being put which is more akin to Bosnia rather than to Iraq, and it is important that we bear in mind what different drivers of radicalisation and what drives people to extremism.

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

My Lords, the Statement reports 1.5 million refugees now, with a current response to the UN humanitarian appeal of 71% of the $1.5 billion for which it is appealing. The Statement goes on to report the further UN assessment that on current trends there will be more than 3.5 million refugees by the end of this year. Have we yet begun to calculate what the financial humanitarian need will be next year?

[Baroness Warsi]

This is the biggest humanitarian appeal ever. Half the country’s population has been displaced, and we are constantly playing catch-up. The UN relief effort is, despite the 71%, still critically underfunded; it is constantly kept at the table, and we continue to assess it. The longer this goes on, the larger the humanitarian need. Without being able to give specifics about what that humanitarian need will be, we should be even more encouraged to bring this matter to a political settlement so that refugees and displaced people can return to their homes.

UK Industry: International Competitiveness

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Thursday 5th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Kakkar, a professor who brings great professional distinction to your Lordships’ House and conspicuous relevance to this debate. I declare an interest as president of the British Art Market Federation, though I am not going to allude to that international market in my speech.

My noble friend Lord Jenkin of Roding, with whom I have made common cause from time to time on behalf of the City of London, deserves all the conventional plaudits for securing this debate and for opening it so characteristically comprehensively. He deserves unconventional ones too for the letter with which he summoned some of us to his cause. It was a model of its kind and spellbinding in its irresistibility, just as he has today added yet another string to his bow and to a repertoire which embraces expert knowledge of the sciences, especially in the energy field, of local government and of what our forebears would have called political economy. He has, moreover, in the first week of July, given us a whiff of the sense of holiday—even of romance—that lies ahead of us at the end of this month when the long Recess beckons.

Trade has its own mystical aromas. This year is the bicentenary of Burckhardt’s rediscovery, after six centuries, of Petra:

“A rose-red city—‘half as old as time’”,

standing at the great Nabatean crossroads of two major trade routes amid the mountains in the Jordanian desert. Across the centuries, those spices of Araby and silks of the East mingle with John Masefield’s:

“Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack,

Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,

With a cargo of Tyne coal,

Road-rails, pig-lead,

Firewood, iron-ware and cheap tin trays”.

Heady though those romantic scents are, there is a different sense in which they are profoundly serious, for unless we can steer our national barque—a Scrabble word I spell for the Hansard writers with a “q” and a “u”—we are not going to evade or escape the slough of despond which is the world’s current economic and financial lot. In the challenging agenda of today’s debate lie the real prospects of recovery from an otherwise intractable fate. In the middle of page 5 of your Lordships’ Library’s admirable note prepared for this debate, there are parentheses from the Office for Budget Responsibility containing the magical words “excluding oils and erratics”. As an undergraduate, I played village cricket for my college in a side called the Erratics, which catches the double sidedness of joy and duty of this voyage. Until today, I had not appreciated that we had then been in philological descent from a trade category.

Since the nature of our predicament makes starting blocks difficult to discern, let me pick out some encouraging—if random—travel brochures. First is the coincidence that in the European Union—which is at this time, saving the grace of many, one or our beds of nails—the complement of overall unemployed is 23 million which, give or take the population of a medium-sized city, exactly coincides with the number of SMEs the Union contains, so that one extra employee in each SME would solve the conundrum of unemployment. It is, of course, a fantasy worthy of the Odyssey because the precise distribution of the unemployed and the national SMEs are not so perfectly aligned, but I cannot conceive of any time in my 18-year private sector career of continuous profit accountability when I could not have constructively added at least one single person to every unit in our business, so it does carry seeds of hope. Moreover, it underlines the virtue of the EU in seeking specially to reduce regulations in units employing fewer than 10 people.

Secondly, the very initials “SME” bring the medium-sized businesses into focus. The lure of the small business as the key to employment growth has been around since Shell promulgated it a third of a century ago, but its now conventional centrality may have taken our eye off the medium-sized ball which, in engineering for instance, provides growth points of great promise. Next, the World Economic Forum’s league tables of international competitiveness show us beginning—even if only patchily—to pick ourselves up off the floor, though I shall return later to one paradox of institutional verdicts which needs attention. Next, it is a truism of success in the world of tourism that a good holiday is made up of dozens of component elements but if one or two go wrong they sully the total recollection. I am struck, in the run-up to this summer’s Games, by how the Olympic totems Wenlock and Mandeville—I take personal pride in the exploits of the latter—have been both imaginative and comprehensive in their management of detail, which is a good augury to be cherished.

Finally, I have sat at the feet of my noble friend Lord Green on the subject of Africa since he took on his present portfolio. We know from the Latin of Pliny the Elder that there is always something new coming out of Africa. I shall be interested in my noble friend’s view on whether he feels Africa collectively is one of the next mega-BRICs—though perhaps one should say mega-BRICAs.

I move from travel brochures to headlines. Despite the contemporary aridity of EU prospects, I find profoundly encouraging the twin facts that, though our manufacturing base has latterly shrunk by almost 50%, our exports of manufactured goods outside the EU have grown by nearly 25% since 2010. That is not merely evidence of a main chance but also of it being seized. Secondly, the virtue that the Library briefing has drawn on so many sources brings home a much greater intellectual coherence to our global trade planning than I would have appreciated prior to preparing for this debate. I find wholly convincing the argument in the research report entitled “Understanding Recent Developments in UK External Trade” in the Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin in the fourth quarter of last year because services exports are less sensitive to movements in the exchange rate, even when I am also aware of how much of our growth in services has been due to the expansion of professional services as against purely financial ones. Trust in us in this area remains globally high.

I am not going to get into the vicissitudes of foreign direct investment—though I realise how we have been currently losing out to the Germans from the Chinese—save to commend the House of Commons Library for its regularly updated Standard Note 1828 on this subject, and to emphasise how much we gain indirectly through technology transfer and management techniques from inward direct investment. Ministers have recently used the car industry as an example. When I started out in business 50 or so years ago, there were already 1,600 American subsidiaries here and it was very noticeable, in sectors like pharmaceuticals, advertising and branded consumer goods, that American participation raised competitiveness to an extent that indigenously there was a substantial economic return in moving suitably flexible British managers from competitive sectors into ones that were notably uncompetitive.

My noble friend responding to the debate will have more than enough to answer when he winds up so, before adding to his agenda, let me utter words of praise. I am profoundly impressed by the way that the Foreign Office under Mr Hague’s leadership is expanding its global commercial and diplomatic coverage, even in these hard times, by reopening embassies and in expanding the consular network, just as my noble and learned friend Lord Howe of Aberavon urged in opposition.

I am full of praise for the growing imaginativeness of UK export finance, as well as that which is helping to secure office space for new UK exporters in effervescent markets. I am delighted by the application of the theory of comparative advantage to the Darwinian evolution of successful exporters through sensitive and sophisticated product choice, especially in emerging markets. However, I have some bits of grit in my shoe, on which I should be happy for the Minister to reply later than today.

The Government have made announcements on enterprise zones, both in the Plan for Growth and the Treasury Press Notice entitled Autumn Statement: Growth of 29 November last year, covering the second phase of the Government’s growth review. However, there are some notable mismatches in the details between the two references. A composite progress report on each of the original choices of zones might be productive.

I return to an earlier comment. The OECD said in its UK economic survey of March 2011 that faster-rising labour costs in UK manufacturing had robbed us of some of the benefit of a 20% appreciation of sterling, whereas the IMF in May 2012 said:

“Encouragingly, labor market performance has been better, with falling unemployment in recent months and fewer employment losses than in the aftermath of previous major UK recessions”.

I realise that there is at least a year between those two comments and that the Government are responsible for neither, but a reconciliation of the paradox would be interesting.

Finally, I hope that the Chancellor’s confession in March 2011 that our tax code had become so complex that it recently overtook India’s to become the longest in the world is not the last word on the subject, even while allowing for his immediate efforts at repair, for unnecessary complexity is not conducive to a good climate in which to do business.

More generally, I hope that we can recover some of what Keynes called “animal spirits”. Paul Claudel, the French poet who was his country’s ambassador in Washington in 1929, could not have known what was in store for the world when he hosted a soirée at the embassy on the first day of the Wall Street crash, and gave a toast to the effect that:

“Between the crisis and the catastrophe there is always time for a glass of champagne”.

However, there is one interesting echo between 1932 and 2012. In 1932, De La Rue was almost bust when a new chairman arrived and decided to take a gamble by throwing a massive dinner for the diplomatic corps, which was so effective in persuading the latter that the company’s future must be secure that security printing orders poured in from across the world. The De La Rue dinner is still with us today, while Greek membership of the eurozone still hovers on the brink.

Let me end as I began. Last month saw the centenary of the poem, “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester”, by my namesake, Rupert. Given when this debate will end, if we can move the church clock from 10 to three on today’s issues between now and the Summer Recess, we shall have been doing our duty and there may, indeed, be honey still for tea.

Pakistan

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Monday 30th January 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

I cannot confirm that because I do not receive a salary.

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

My Lords, does my noble friend welcome the recovery in Pakistan cricket? Does he further think that it would be a happy conclusion to the present series if we won the last test?

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

In seeking a positive side of developments in Pakistan, I certainly had in my notes that its cricket was coming along quite well, but like my noble friend I rather hope that in the next round we do a little better.

UNESCO

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Wednesday 16th November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

That is, of course, a broader question. The noble Lord is absolutely right that the question of Palestinian statehood lies behind the question of whether partial arrangements, as it were, for statehood should be made by Palestine applying to various UN organisations, of which UNESCO is one. It is the judgment and view of Her Majesty’s Government that the way forward must be by negotiation for the emergence of the Palestinian state. We reserve the right to recognise the Palestinian state at the moment of our choosing. We take the view that a fragmented application to UNSECO and other bodies is probably a mistake and will delay negotiation. We also take the view that, if the matter is to go to the Security Council—I say “if”—and if then, as is almost certain, the Americans vetoed it, that, too, would set back negotiation very substantially. It may be rather limited now but it is going to be even more limited—indeed, it will screw it up completely—if that course is followed. There are plenty of ifs and buts in the future. Beyond that, there is the possibility that it might go to the General Assembly as well, but all these matters have yet to be decided.

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

My Lords, how often do Her Majesty’s Government receive representations from our allies about our own decisions on international subscriptions?

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

I did not hear the precise words—were they “how often”?

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

On how many occasions do Her Majesty’s Government receive representations from our allies on our decisions on international subscriptions?

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

I have absolutely no idea. The world is not like that. It is not a question of representations. Obviously there are discussions in the corridors at multinational meetings on who is going to subscribe to what. That is perfectly natural, but we make our own decisions in the end.

Commonwealth Games: Delhi

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Monday 28th June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

My Lords, has India held the Commonwealth Games before and, if so, how many times?

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

My Lords, I am not 100 per cent sure, but I do not think it has. This is a very big and important development for India and I think they will be the biggest Commonwealth Games held so far, with many participants from all over the world.