Commonwealth

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Thursday 17th October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Luce’s initiative in holding this debate could not be better timed in that it enables this House to look at the wider issues and future development of the Commonwealth, as well as addressing some of the short-term matters arising in connection with next month’s Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Sri Lanka. Too often in the past, those short-term issues have obscured the need for us to take a clear-eyed view of the role that the Commonwealth should play in the overall picture of Britain’s external relations. Too often also, successive British Governments have approached a heads of government meeting with either a spirit of damage limitation or excessive expectations. Neither of those approaches is a good guide to long-term policy-making.

The first step in taking that wider view is to rid ourselves of two misconceptions. The first is that the Commonwealth is in some way an alternative for this country to its membership of the European Union. It is no more that now than it was when the Macmillan and Wilson Governments concluded in the 1960s that it was not a viable alternative. Indeed, it is even less so than then. So far as I can see, not one Commonwealth Government wants Britain to leave the European Union and most would deeply deplore it, as the Australian Government—not the most enthusiastic supporter of Britain’s original membership back in the 1960s—made clear in a recent submission to the Government’s balance of competences review. Looking ahead, we should surely conclude, just as the French have done over the Francophonie, that this is not an either/or choice but a both/and one.

The second misconception is the tendency for Britain to take a proprietorial view of the Commonwealth. We may have founded the organisation but it does not belong to us, any more than it does to its other members. When we talk about the Commonwealth as being a soft-power asset for Britain, which I believe it is—and which I am sure the committee of the noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford, will find it to be—it can only be so to the extent that it is a soft-power asset for all its members.

Has the Commonwealth expanded too far? I do not believe so. It was right to respond positively to the membership bids by Mozambique and Rwanda. The Commonwealth of the future should not be regarded simply as a prolongation of an imperial colonial past. If one day in the future a democratic, human-rights observant Myanmar were to wish to join, I hope we would welcome it with open arms. We must certainly not abandon the hope that one day Zimbabwe, too, will want to—and will be able to—rejoin.

In what way should we be trying to strengthen the Commonwealth? I certainly do not believe that we should give up the aim of making the Commonwealth a more effective guarantor of the human rights of its citizens. That aim was checked at the last CHOGM meeting in Perth. The holding of the next meeting in Sri Lanka will certainly not strengthen its credibility, but we should persevere in the effort in the medium and long term. We need to build up that network of professional cultural links, which are such an important part of the Commonwealth’s value to its members.

In that context, the Government’s immigration policy, which seems to be having a disproportionately discouraging effect on the movement of professionals—it is certainly doing so in the field of higher education, where large drops are occurring in the intake of students from a number of the larger Commonwealth countries—surely needs to be reviewed. There is a contradiction between the Government’s support for the Commonwealth and the effect of their immigration policies. Surely, too, we should be expanding further the grant of Commonwealth scholarships in this country and not limiting them to its developing members.

The Commonwealth has many achievements behind it, not least the remarkably effective stand that it took against apartheid in sport. I would be confident that it has many more ahead of it, so long as it does not compromise its values, and that it will remain for the foreseeable future an indispensable part of Britain's international relationships.