Commonwealth Parliamentary Association

Lord Howe of Aberavon Excerpts

Thursday 8th September 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howe of Aberavon]

My Lords, I welcome the debate on this subject. The Commonwealth is one of the few large, multinational organisations that have a very important position in the world in so many ways. This may be a surprising observation from me, as I am regarded—unjustly—as a eurofanatic and as caring very little about these things. In fact, as a Welshman, I go back to my days in the Sunday school at Carmel chapel, Aberavon, in 1935, when we were presented with a card from His Majesty King George V, celebrating his Silver Jubilee, which contained this sentence:

“I ask you to remember that in days to come you will be the citizens of a great empire”,

and I always have remembered that.

It fell to my lot, rather fortunately, some 12 years later, when I found myself commissioned in the Army— in the Royal Signals, though still having very little understanding of electronic science—to be posted to east Africa. I was stationed in Nanyuki on the equator, as second-in-command of the East African Signals troop, with 20 British NCOs and 100 Africans covering Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika. I am reminded very much of the extent to which my black signallers had seen service in the Burma campaign with the 11th East African Division. Sergeant Mbela Kasema BEM was one of these. He had come to represent them in the victory parade, and was still corresponding with a girlfriend in Chalk Farm. Among other things, I had to instruct my African soldiers in the greater benefits of “Kingy George Five” rather than Bwana Joe Stalin. I became very conscious of the fact that we were all grown-up children of the same great Empire that King George had commended with his message so many years before. So indeed I found it during the six years which I had the privilege to spend as Foreign Secretary, because there was no doubt about the importance of the Commonwealth.

One particular feature, which I will come back to, relates to the fact that I was, on demobilisation to Cambridge in 1948, given the alternative of going as a captain to command the signals troop in Mogadishu. I did not take that up because the signals troop there was simultaneously giving service to the Somali Youth League as well as the interests of their own unit. That was a rather unfortunate episode, but it drew my attention to Somaliland and, subsequently, to the existence of British Somaliland—of which more in a moment.

As Foreign Secretary, I came quickly to realise the importance of the Commonwealth in so many different ways. One that struck me almost immediately was how much better informed I was in going to IMF meetings, or things of that kind, than the Secretary of State from the United States because I had acquaintance with a whole range of countries, many of which paid great tribute to Britain’s contribution. I recall one observation made by Yaqub Khan, the Foreign Minister for so many years of Pakistan, when he welcomed me to the country and said, “You will enjoy it here—you will find it peopled by the noble ghosts of Britain's past”. I found similar tributes would come in from the leaders of many Commonwealth countries. Commonwealth conferences, or Prime Minister’s conferences, are enormously valuable in finding agreement between the Commonwealth members with their great diversity. For example, it helped us in getting across to all the Commonwealth countries, notably in dialogue between my noble friend Lady Thatcher and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, the sincerity of our attempt to bring the Cold War to an end.

I want to close, if I may, with a minute on the problems of British Somaliland, which are very serious because of its subsequent merger in the greater state of Somalia, where it has now suffered adversely as a result of corruption and worse in that country. A very valuable comment on the whole situation was made in the debate in the other place by Tony Worthington, who I think was on the Select Committee on International Development when it visited Somaliland. He pointed out that:

“Our foreign service hang-ups about recognition are getting in the way of us fulfilling our duty to pursue the millennium development goals for the poor people of Somaliland”.—[Official Report, Commons, 4/2/04; col. 273WH.]

The reason is that it would like to be admitted to the Commonwealth—comparable to the admissions of, for example, Rwanda and Mozambique, which have been a great advantage to those countries and to ourselves.

British Somaliland, as it was, is not getting the treatment that it deserves. I cannot spend any more time describing the history behind that but I hope that Her Majesty's Government will pay attention to the case being tenaciously argued by a number of people for the recognition of British Somaliland, so that we are able to deal with it more independently than it is now being dealt with, in the unhappy marriage that it agreed to make with the rest of Somalia some years ago.