European Union (Referendum) Bill

Lord Selsdon Excerpts

Friday 10th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Selsdon (Con)]

My Lords, I have rather enjoyed myself, which is quite usual in your Lordships’ House. However, when I first came here something over 50 years ago, I was told, “Don’t worry, my dear chap. You will be used as cannon fodder for a period of time”. There were two great people who used me as cannon fodder: the late Lord Jellicoe and the late Lord Shackleton.

On one occasion, Lord Jellicoe said, “Look, this European lark is getting rather interesting. We are going to shove you on the Council of Europe”. I could not possibly admit to him that I did not know what the Council of Europe was. Lord Shackleton said, “Well, I’m getting involved in eastern European matters and things of that sort and, soon, part of the Soviet bloc will come back and become part of Europe”. This was all right for me, but I had a full-time job with two weeks’ holiday, and swanning off to Strasbourg was not really part of the game, so I agreed with my employers that I would not take a rise in salary and would have only one week’s holiday.

As I went off to Strasbourg, I suddenly realised that what we were talking about was people who had a fear of war; almost everybody you met had fought in the war. That was something that I had not thought about. As you moved on over a period of time, so trade became important.

I thoroughly enjoyed that period but began to wonder where it would lead us. We then came to the referendum of earlier days, and I would like just to quote Alec Douglas-Home, who in 1971 said:

“In this House and out of it, there is widespread recognition that we have reached the time of decision, and that the proper place for that decision to be taken is Parliament”.—[Official Report, Commons, 21/10/71; col. 912.]

That is what we are talking about today. James Callaghan, at the same time, said:

“Tonight is no more than the first skirmish in the struggle, in the course of which we shall, I hope, by debate and discussion between ourselves, establish what is Britain’s correct relationship with Europe and what is our role in the world ahead”.—[Official Report, Commons, 28/10/71; col. 2202.]

Again, that was in 1971.

In the middle, I got dropped in it again—it was not really due to my noble friend Lord MacGregor—because I suddenly found that I was, effectively, treasurer of the Conservative Group for Europe. I was the one who was meant to find money and, in particular, money for the referendum. Of course, a lot of mistakes were made in those early days and, suddenly, you found to your surprise when everything went through that the Labour Party refused to send a delegation to Strasbourg. As a result, the Conservatives had a problem in that they did not have any money, because you could not get any money for a vote of that sort. So what did they do? They turned to the treasurer of the Conservative Group for Europe, who with his secretary found himself in difficulty. I suggested that we should hold a great event. We managed to get the Banqueting House—Geoffrey Rippon was very kind and helpful—to hold a big event for the first time so that those in industry and the financial world would understand the difficulties that we were in, would understand that I had been dropped in it and would agree to subscribe.

Unfortunately, a certain leading Conservative figure made a speech during that period, when life was pretty bad, and said that everything was good, so no money was forthcoming. So I had a brief moment wondering whether I would be sued, but somehow the great and the good turned up and gave me a cheque and we managed effectively. But they were the problems in those days.

When Sir Alec Douglas-Home made the suggestion in that debate that a decision should be made by Parliament, Stanley Orme said:

“No. Ask the people”.—[Official Report, Commons, 21/10/71; col. 912.]

In the time when I was involved, we went through the EEC, the ECSC and all those areas and finally thought, “Well, could we not actually call it Europe?” and then, “Where does Europe begin and end?”. Without doubt, in all my time there, the key factor was bilateral trade, which in due course became immigration. But suddenly, we ask ourselves the question: “What is it all about?”. It is really about economic rather than political affairs, and I would be most grateful if any one of your Lordships would be kind enough, quietly over the weekend, to sit with a piece of paper and draw for me the current map of Europe.

British Indian Ocean Territory

Lord Selsdon Excerpts

Wednesday 27th November 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Selsdon (Con)]

My Lords, about an hour and a half ago a charming lady came up to me and said, “I wonder if I could persuade you to speak in my debate”. It was the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker. I realised that the rest of my party had gone off to some smart dinner, while I was going to eat quietly here, but what the noble Baroness did not know is that I have a great affection for Mauritius.

When I was in the banking world we dealt with most of the world’s countries, including the Commonwealth ones, and I used to allocate Easter for an adventure and take my small son with me. One year, that adventure was to Mauritius to see whether we could help it compete with the Seychelles on tourism. I happened to mention it to Lord Jellicoe, who was the Leader of the House. He said, “They’ve got sugar over there. Go and have a look round, will you?”. Anyway, I went with my family, including my five year-old son.

I arrived at the airport to find a crowd there, rather as it was for the noble Lord, Lord Luce. The crowd was clapping, cheering and waving and a man came up to me and said, “How nice to meet you. My name’s Ramgoolam—I am the premier. How nice of you to come. Have you come to look into sugar? But why don’t you enjoy yourself on holiday? I’ve made a booking for you in a hotel and here’s my driver Dypoo, who will take you around and show you things”. We had a really wonderful time and 10 years later, Dypoo became one of my international spies—he was driving the ambassadors in Washington. However, I fell in love with the place. It was not really the most suitable for sugar but, at that time, tourism was on the make. The Seychelles had grabbed everything, rather as the Maldives have now, and Mauritius was a bit flat. However, we happened to own Thomas Cook and managed to do some help out there.

Being an islander, I have always had affection for islands. I love the sea and coastlines. One thing I keep citing in your Lordships’ House is that if you take the coastlines of the Commonwealth, it has 60% of the total in the world. In the Mauritian area of the Indian Ocean there are 112,000 kilometres of coastline. What do the seas mean to us? In fact, they mean fish, which is effectively one of the highest added-value products in the world at the moment. Your Lordships will be aware that illegal fishing is now estimated to be at between $10 billion and $24 billion per annum, and that there is worry about the depletion of fish stocks. Going with that illegal fishing, there is then the piracy and extortion taking place worldwide. If you take a view of the islands in that part of the world, it becomes quite a significant business.

I speak of Mauritius but I do not know the other islands. I have them all plotted on a map; I have the coastlines and the population of each, the distances they cover, whether the coral is good or not and whether any underground cables were laid there. But it is an important place as a staging post, as the United States reckons. We should not forget that RAF Gan, as I think it was called, used to be there. As an island nation, dependent on the sea and with our own large fishing fleet, we cannot ignore it. At the moment, our own fleet is 21% of the world’s fleet and has 27% of its gross tonnage. Mauritius has 49 vessels totalling 53,000 tonnes.

It is in the maritime sector that we could attach much importance to our relationship with this place, which I love and to which I would like to find a reason to go back again. There was a moment there when I saw someone on a stick and a bit of board, windsurfing. I had never seen a windsurfer before. In a short time, I had fallen in again and again but there was my small son, aged five, windsurfing on the back of some door or other with a Mauritian boy. I fell in love with that place, as I do with any islands. When I look at the whole Indian Ocean I say that we should have a political, economic and commercial strategy of our own. The Indian Ocean is important. I have not come to piracy yet, which is a favourite subject, but that will be for another day.

Commonwealth

Lord Selsdon Excerpts

Thursday 17th October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Selsdon (Con)]

My Lords, I am honoured to follow in the steps of the noble Lord, Lord Luce, and also of my noble friend Lord Howell, who lead on these matters.

I am a by-product of the Commonwealth. I was brought up in Canada; my family were Australian-Scots; my great-uncle was Stafford Cripps and then Ghana came into it. I feel rather homeless. While I was pro the EU, I am now rather anti the EU and becoming more and more pro the Commonwealth.

In my office I have a large map, a chart, which I look at every day. Most of it is covered in red and it shows the position of His Majesty’s ships at sea and in harbour on the date of my birth. I will not say when that was. That chart reminds me that the Empire, if I may dare call it that, was based upon trade and created added value. I looked at the chart this morning and saw that in those days we were out there not for political reasons but to buy. We took 60% of the tea crop of India; 30% of the tea crop of Ceylon; 27% of the Caribbean coffee production; 42% of Africa’s; 32% of New Zealand’s butter and 60% of its cheese. It went on and on, with wheat, flax, aluminium, zinc, copper and lead from Australia. All these things were creating added value, and that was trade.

As development in the economies grew, so people went out to them to find work. My Scottish family had the opportunity to ship masses of people out to Australia, but they had no back cargo. Then they found that there was meat. British technology developed the chilling machinery so that lamb and other meat could come back from Australia. To me, the Commonwealth should be more about trade and less about politics. But when looking at the world I conclude irrevocably, partly from being a navigator and recognising that Greenwich is the centre of the earth, that the United Kingdom is now in effect the centre of the earth in terms of politics, trade, intellectual property and people.

Having been brought up in Canada, I have wondered whether I am a Commonwealth citizen. If I am a member of the Commonwealth, why can I not have a little tampon or stamp for my passport saying, “Commonwealth citizen”? In the early days of immigration and migration, people wondered why we could not give precedence to people who were from the Commonwealth nations, but as time moves on, I realise that politics comes into this. For example, we seem to be a bit worried about the Gambia at the moment.

In my days in the banking world, I thought it would be a good idea to look at all countries, not just the Commonwealth countries which seemed to have run out of money. I wanted to get back as much money as possible from Claude Cheysson at the Commission, who was spending it on French projects around the world rather than on British ones. I went on a trip. My noble friend Lord Moynihan will recall that we had a great mentor in the person of Lord Jellicoe. I went to west Africa with Lord Jellicoe and the Duke of Kent to visit the French territories and I found myself being adopted by Société Commerciale de l’Ouest Africain. The society asked me to help it in Senegal, saying that there was a problem with the British territory over on the other side of the water. I went on holiday to Senegal with my wife and small son because people are kind to children when you are travelling abroad and not being too commercial. Later, back at my bank, I looked into the possibility of creating a “Senegambia”. That was because the Frenchman I met wore a rather smart khaki bomber jacket-type uniform, while the other one was dressed in what was in effect British gear. I use that just as an aside, but the idea behind it is that we should co-operate with France as well.

Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises

Lord Selsdon Excerpts

Wednesday 26th June 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Selsdon]

My Lords, forgive me, I was just trying to work out how many members of the committee were speaking today. I know that they will all be the best informed and that those like me will have relatively little information or knowledge.

I am extraordinarily impressed by the change that has taken place, probably over the past 12 months, in the attitude of the UKTI and the public sector to the promotion and development of trade. I wonder why my noble friend Lord Green has decided to leave a ship that is not sinking. I pay tribute to him because of this change of attitude.

I started my life in industry in the asbestos industry, working in new products called plastics. I suddenly thought I was in the wrong business, tried to get another job and ended up doing market research. My two greatest clients were the Government of Japan, through JETRO, and the Government of India. For several years we looked at what they could sell abroad and at the marketing and never realised that India and Japan would be two of the biggest investors in the United Kingdom. We probably never dreamed that our automotive industry would be saved by Indian investment.

I want now to look a little into the balance of trade. We suffer from a major deficit on manufacturing and always have done. I declare my interest in that my great uncle Stafford Cripps was president of the Board of Trade and drew attention to those problems. Every time I have spoken here I have drawn attention to it. Does it matter that we have a deficit on manufacturing if we have a surplus somewhere else? We have to accept that the balance of payments deficit on manufacturing is going to continue for quite a long time. Whether it will be supported by a surplus from the financial institutions, which are under quite an aggressive attack at the moment, is another matter.

We are left with the initiatives that can be taken. I was on the British Overseas Trade Board, I chaired the Middle East trade committee—I was on all these things. I used to go to the DTI practically weekly. I could not understand why suddenly at a stroke one of the previous Governments got rid of the British Overseas Trade Board and all the advisory bodies related to the promotion and development of trade. Suddenly they were replaced by a lot of new advisers, many of whom did not necessarily know the country they were going to deal with. Hundreds of them were being appointed, but the Government forgot that in the days of the BOTB the area advisory groups had, free of charge for the Government, advisers who worked on the ground in all the countries. My own responsibilities lay particularly with the Middle East and with Africa. I was told, “My dear chap, you are young enough to be alive when something important happens, but it is going to take a long time”. Now when we look at our balance of payments, we do not seem to be worried.

Occasionally I get asked to start things. I started something recently and I went into the UKTI for the first time. The biggest problem was that it could not get a room to fit enough of us in. It was busy and humming and someone had the decency to think that I looked prosperous and tried to sell me the helicopter in the entrance. A new attitude has come out of all this that I find stimulating and far from worrying.

I look back to the small and medium-sized enterprises. I do not know why we call them SMEs; I just call them people. We want people who will take the initiative. The term entrepreneur used to be used. I used to use that term until I was told—the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, could probably help—to try to translate it back into English. If you do that it becomes “undertaker” —someone who undertakes things. Translate that back into French and it becomes croque-mort, which is a different form of undertaker. The English language makes life fun. Here we have SMEs. Why do the Government want to have initials? Have you ever tried to pronounce UKTI in different languages? It is not possible. No one can understand what you are talking about. The same is true for SMEs; it is a girl’s name in one of the countries, I have forgotten which. Why have we suddenly dropped the word “trade”?

The small entrepreneurial business, as it may be called, was always the lifeblood of the United Kingdom historically. Someone would go off abroad, find an opportunity, come back and try to demonstrate it. He might even have bought himself a new briefcase to look more important or invented a nice name. I have always enjoyed and loved the sole trader. The balance of payments deficit on manufacturing now is desperate with every country, except for what we used to call the countries of the third world, which is now known as the emerging markets. They always used to be great markets for the United Kingdom. My grandfather when he was in trade—he was on the Board of Trade at one time—would trade with Mongolia, the West Indies and Latin America, which seem to have been rediscovered. Why did we suddenly change all these names? Why can we not go back to trade?

It is quite intriguing too when we ask for money. Most of the banks these days recognise that if they finance trade projects they get a very large fee, and if you are providing export credit you have the United Kingdom state guarantee and can make a 1.5% margin virtually risk free. These are the sorts of incentives that encourage the financial sector to look for trading opportunities.

When our original empire—if that is what it may be called—started, it was based on technology, engineering, building railways, building bridges and providing connections. Now we move into the strange new electronic world, which is perhaps beyond my own pay grade. Anyone starting a business now has to realise that they do not have to leave their office to be able to communicate worldwide. They do not necessarily have to travel. I keep saying to people, “Do not travel there. First, send an invitation asking them to come and see you”. An awful lot of people from all around the world want an invitation to come to London or to the United Kingdom. You find people who are looking for clients and invite them over here. They come on holidays. The relationships get built, and while we may criticise ourselves for being a multicultural society, if that is what it is, it is what we always were in the days of the British Empire when it developed and was built.

I end with a point not just about the size of our small country but about the influence that stems from the Commonwealth and others. It is a little bit of fun being treasurer of the House of Lords Yacht Club. We do not have much money. I sat down one day to look at where our influence lay. I have raised this in the House before. I looked at economic exclusion zones. There is a 200-nautical mile limit that goes around your own country. The region around the Commonwealth and our own territories accounts for 60% of the entire EEZs of the world. The French have another 15%. If we got together with the French, we would have 75% of the 200-mile limits. The resources and all the developments are there.

We are a maritime nation. We were entrepreneurs or “undertakers” and now we are small businesses, which are the ones that will grow. I so enjoy it when a man comes into my office to see me, I say, “What are you doing?”, and he says, “I have just started my business. I am moonlighting at the moment. I hope I can make it work so that I can leave my boring job in a rather big organisation”. The enthusiasm is there. I congratulate the Government on this change of attitude within UKTI, and I hope that it continues.

UK Industry: International Competitiveness

Lord Selsdon Excerpts

Thursday 5th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Selsdon]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Jenkin of Roding, who has an ability to set the scene; it makes it very difficult for those who follow. What I have just heard from my noble friend is almost a layout of what the immigrants should learn if they are to come to the United Kingdom.

I shall take as a theme, “We have been there before. It has already happened, so why are we repeating ourselves?”. When I have nothing better to do, I write White Papers about things that I think should happen. The noble Lord, Lord Stevenson of Balmacara, a fellow Scot, will remember what we were taught in early days: if a man had no estate, there were only three things that he could do. First, he could help other people to do it, in which case he joined the professions. Now, though, for all the professions—accountancy, law—there is doom and gloom, because they find reasons why you should not do something. Or he could take the credit for those who did it, in which case he went into politics. However, if you were a real man, you went out and did it. The noble Lord was sitting as a lone ranger on his Benches. I am not saying that there is no interest on his side—I used the past tense.

I will go back and say, “We’ve been there before”. I take as my theme today, “Yesterday’s story”. If we go back into the past, this was the sort of phrase that was given as an instruction to government—in this case, a guide for the Board of Trade, saying that it should,

“take into their consideration, the true causes of the decay of trade and scarcity of coyne … and to consult the means for the removing of these inconveniences”.

That was in 1621. I can give you one for every year; there is a wonderful book on the history of the Board of Trade. It has gone out of print and I have just rewritten it. I hope that I can give you others.

What successive Governments did was to forget the past. They went and got rid of the Board of Trade and put in place something called BIS—the sort of thing that dogs do before breakfast. No one understood, and the word “business” was divisive. I chaired various trade bodies and went on trade missions, always to places where no one else wanted to go. That was usually at the instigation of two great Leaders of this House, Lord Jellicoe and Lord Shackleton.

Lord Jellicoe said one day, “My dear chap, you ought to do a bit more to help the House. I’m going to put you on Sub-Committee B on the European Union”. I said, “What’s that?” He said, “Liven it up a bit—it’s meant to do something about trade”. There were only three members of that committee: Lord Dennis, myself, and I have forgotten the other one. We went to a series of meetings and we were not sure what we were talking about. We really thought that it ought to be about trade. Then one day we had a visit from the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the noble Lord, Lord Lawson. He sat with these distinguished people; the committee was called the Aldington Committee. We asked him a few questions, although I personally was never able to ask a question because I did not like to intervene among my elders and betters. When we were having discussions about money supply, which seemed to be more important than trade, Lord Amery asked for an explanation. The Chancellor at that time said, “I’m not quite sure if I can get up to your level”. He made an explanation that led to the famous remark from Lord Amery, “I am very grateful, Chancellor, for your explanation. I am most confused but very happy to be more confused at a much higher level”.

Today we are talking about the same sorts of problems: money or trading finance. We have forgotten some of the basic principles. You see, we have a trade deficit in visibles, or in manufactures, of £100 billion, rising at 10% per annum. I always take everything back to when my great-uncle Stafford Cripps devalued the pound in 1948; I have a schedule that runs through that. We have a deficit, and we finance it in part with what I call “invisibles”. Your Lordships may remember that Sir Cyril Kleinwort created the Committee on Invisible Exports that used to wander down from the City to try to lobby their Lordships and others in order to get us to do something to support trade. That soon disappeared, but the invisible surplus is not enough to offset the deficit, and it is getting worse.

We then went into the EU, your Lordships may remember. I was treasurer of the Conservative Europe Group because no one else would take the job, and together with the noble Lord, Lord MacGregor, we had to raise money because the Labour Party did not want to go into Europe at all; they were totally against it. We had a vote in favour here in your Lordships’ House—very nearly a greater vote than for the abolition of hanging—and we went into Europe, as though that would be the be-all and end-all.

I do not believe in exports and imports; I just call it trade. You have a good trade or a bad one, but you trade with anyone who is willing or able to pay, provided that you like them. As soon as you would use the word “business”, the Foreign Office runs away and says that it cannot be seen with a businessman, a box-wallah. The same went for Ministers at home because it seemed wrong to be looking at trade in this sort of way.

When we look around the world today, we find that our biggest single deficit is with the EU. The phrase that we adopted in those early days was, “Britain in Europe: it’s our business to be there”. It was not about a political wish or the controls that would come later, it was simply about business and trade. So we have a thumping great deficit with all the EU countries except Ireland, where we have a surplus. However, some of that surplus comes from containers that arrive in England and then are shipped across to Ireland where the added value goes, because the Irish would not have the money to pay for the amount of trade that we do with them.

That is all just to set a bit of background. I feel that we should go back into the past and look at what the Board of Trade was established for, along with some of the roles played by your Lordships, a subject that has been raised already. One of the key elements of trade—good trade rather than bad—is relationships. This has often been a difficult problem for those who go on all-party group visits, missions and so on, when you wish to discuss the concept of business. Your Lordships’ House, with its 800 Members, has a relationship with every single quarter of the world, and we are still respected. My noble friend Lord Green knows that well. For some time I was president of the British Exporters Association, although that now consists almost entirely of financial institutions—there are hardly any manufacturers left.

If we are looking at where we end up in future—we have raised both the Commonwealth and new markets—the financing of trade has always been one of our skills and it was one of my own responsibilities. At one time it was not necessary to get government guarantees for anything if you had reciprocal trade. We would often go out and sign individual reciprocal trade agreements with any country where you could buy something and then finance it by selling. I will use the simple example of Cuba. We did not have a good relationship with Cuba, but Lord Walston did. He was a Labour Peer and a very good friend of mine; he was not allowed to go to Cuba officially but was allowed by the Foreign Office to visit it on his way to his plantations in another part of the Caribbean. He knew Castro well and we had a few discussions. We said, “What can you sell?”. Naturally, we were all thinking of cigars or rum, and had forgotten that Bacardi was originally a Cuban product. They said, “We do very good grapefruits”. I sighed, “Oh God”. Anyway, I was lucky enough to know someone at Marks and Spencer, so I picked up the phone to them and said, “The Cubans do a rather funny sort of pink grapefruit. Will you buy some?”. They said, “Yes, why not? Tell them to send a shipload”. I turned to the Minister and said, “Could we send a shipload of pink grapefruit?”. That all started with a simple trade.

In those days it was quite difficult when we did not have good diplomatic relations. I found this when I chaired the Middle East trade committee. I could go to Iran, Iraq or any one of the Arab or Middle Eastern countries totally free and unencumbered, because I would be invited. You did not need security; indeed, often it was dangerous if you got together with your own embassy. You would be told, “No, diplomatic relations are not good enough at the moment to be able to prosecute trade”. I never understood that word “prosecution”; it has something to do with following on, but it always seemed a rather negative phrase.

What I am saying quietly here is that we within your Lordships’ House should give consideration again to all those bodies—the British Overseas Trade Board, which was chaired by Lord Jellicoe, the East European Trade Council, which was chaired by Lord Shackleton, and all the others—where individuals and their friends had relationships, often historic, with all these countries, and that could run across the Francophone territories and all the Commonwealth. As my noble friend Lord Sheikh has said, the Commonwealth is a great opportunity.

I have no fears. I just feel that we have subsumed ourselves in the most complex bureaucracy around. Ministers are not really allowed to do business or to sell, although they can come and promote and talk. If your Lordships’ House can identify those people who might be willing to help, then I feel that we have a great sales force.

Israel and Palestine: West Bank

Lord Selsdon Excerpts

Monday 21st May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

I am grateful for the sympathy of a former Chief Whip for a Minister when there are two sides to these questions and an element of balance is essential in assessing the realities and prospects. There is more that this country can do and seeks to do, collectively with our allies such as United Nations colleagues, within the EU and bilaterally. We can press on the various points that may yield some progress towards reconciliation and settlement. Israel’s security has to be considered. The noble Lord says that there is nothing to lose but always at the back of people’s minds are questions of Israel’s security. At the same time, these are occupied territories. We want to see an end to that process and a two-state solution that is not undermined by the settlements. These are all aspirations towards which we can and do work, beyond being concerned day-to-day about specific issues such as the one we are discussing now.

[Lord Selsdon]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a producer of olive trees. I have only 200 but I assure your Lordships that an olive tree takes a long time to grow. It has much significance, not least because of Gethsemane and the Mount of Olives. There is politics in this as well. Will my noble friend tell me what the economic deficit is here? What cost is being incurred by uprooting these olive trees and what is their value?

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

As we are dealing with newly planted trees, their value is all in the future. However, I am grateful to my noble friend for his reminder of the significance of the olive tree. I am full of admiration for his growing them because I was told that you could not grow olive trees with decent olives north of Valence in France.

Christians in the Middle East

Lord Selsdon Excerpts

Friday 9th December 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Selsdon]

My Lords, the wonderful thing about your Lordships’ House is that it never fails to surprise, to entertain and to inform. At the moment I am a little let down by tears because this is by far the most interesting collection of speeches that I have heard in all my time in this House—but I should have known that because the right reverend Prelates are extremely well educated and well informed. They absorb information in a way that even a wet sponge cannot do. What is it about them? First, we are not going to let them go from this House. We need them and have always needed them, as the knowledge that has been imparted to us today demonstrates.

I would like to thank the most reverend Primate for surprising me. I suffer from many disadvantages. I was christened into the Church of Scotland, but no one bothered to tell me until maybe 10 years after the war. My Christian name is Malcolm, after St Columba, the dove of peace. My family motto is “Deus Providebit”—God will provide, with a hand holding a cross crosslet. I was not quite sure what the three little crosses were until someone said, “Perhaps you could cheat a bit and call them church, law and Parliament, the three great estates”.

The school that I went to, Winchester, surprised me the other day. I was not adequately academic to be academically active, but I got a note advising that they had bought a copy of the first edition of the King James Bible. I then found to my surprise that one of the earlier headmasters had actually translated it and had pointed out that there were dangers in translation in terms of misinterpretation. Even the brochure, or little leaflet, that I got showed many examples of complete misinterpretation.

So I go back to the power of the word—the written word, the spoken word—and,

“the Word was with God”.

What I fear may happen in these days between church, law and Parliament is misunderstandings and misinterpretations between religions, particularly those that are based upon the written word. Hence, I shall not stray too far into the people of the book, because, unfortunately, the books that I was going to read yesterday at some length did not arrive from the Library in time.

I have done many things in my life, but for a long period I was chairman of the Committee for Middle East Trade, responsible for trying to encourage and develop trade in the Middle East. This meant that the Foreign Office would recommend that you went to the most awful places because no one else could go there. Among other things, I had to go to Iran without a visa to try to sort out the problem of The Satanic Verses. I was picked up and taken to Isfahan, the holy city. I had an Islamic lawyer; I had a mullah; I had my own team, whose English was not perhaps quite as good as my own, and we had room for misunderstandings. But we sat to decide and discuss what should happen next.

In that, I suddenly learnt that people quote things. My quotations would have been:

“Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir,

Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine”.

I used to have to learn things parrot-wise—14 lines, a sonnet each week—and also in German. Often I did not know what they meant, but I had learnt them and then I could trot them out for no reason.

In my time in the Middle East dealing with trade, we found that, every time there was some problem, you would have a debate and a discussion of the Word and the writings—Old Testament, New Testament and, of course, occasionally the Koran. Trade was the advantage, because it is the duty of every good Muslim to trade. That, I had never heard in religion before, but it would mean that when you were talking with someone in a souk, next door to him would be a Jewish trader with his children being trained. There was no problem in the trade. You looked at the old trade route and you found that, in general, it was not emotion or religion that caused the problem; it was temporal matters such as territorial gain.

We have failed to recognise or note today the tremendous importance of our own British colonialism or empire over Middle Eastern territories for a long period. We were there mainly because of the opportunities for the development and creation of added value to resources. We forgot, too, that the Arab world—which I tend to refer to it as, rather than the Middle East—was based historically on trade. They were the first slavers, seeking above all white slaves, who were at a far greater premium. They were the ones who sailed the world. They were the first navigators. There is an ancient culture there that is difficult for many people to understand. Over my time, I have been drip-fed and I have appreciated the knowledge and learning that comes with it. The trouble is that if you are not properly trained in these matters, you can suddenly find yourself one day in the Sinai desert in the middle of a minefield where you have been asked to develop a hotel called Hammam Phar’oun—Pharaoh’s Bath—on the very spot that Musa or Moses took his staff, stuck it in the ground and water came out, having just passed across the Red Sea at low tide. As you read these books you realise that each generation alters the text slightly and there may be misinterpretations. At the end of the day, surprisingly enough, it is the written word that has power. We can look at treaties, we can look at everything else and we can look at people.

We used to say that the Foreign Office was all Arabist. They used to drop the “W” from the name of the noble Lord, Lord Wright of Richmond, because he was always right. I would find myself in Petra having meetings with people or at the bottom of Jordan with Alec Douglas Hume, whose speeches we should not forget, and the noble Baroness, Lady Thatcher. We were trying to work out the future. I was picked up by plane and taken back to Oman. The next day I was being flown by King Hussein in his plane back to England. He said, “We are in the air now so we can talk freely”. I asked why and he said, “We are between heaven and earth”. You could talk very openly with these people and I found that there were three postures—the official, the religious and the personal. In all these territories, which I got to know very well, I would look at the trade routes. I would be amazed that the Jewish faith was particularly popular in Dakar, Senegal. As you moved across the Atlantic, the same was the case in Sao Paulo and you realised that it was due to periods of migration or persecution that moved whole nations.

I do not fear too much about the future of the Middle East as it is, but I feel that there are so many opportunities and misunderstandings and we must look back to the books. Islam says that he who kills shall surely himself be killed, and that he who forgives from a position of strength is more honourable than he who forgives from a position of weakness. When I read this debate, a little tear will come to my eye. We have had a remarkable collection of speeches so far. It will be difficult to differentiate between the speech, the sermon or ultimately what will become the saying.

Commonwealth Parliamentary Association

Lord Selsdon Excerpts

Thursday 8th September 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Selsdon]

My Lords, as always, I am extremely grateful to my noble friend Lady Hooper for the way in which she introduces these debates. She is a remarkably dynamic character. As she knows well, dynamics stands for “Do you need a more interesting challenge?”. I have spoken in these debates on many occasions because, in a strange way, I am descended from colonials who failed in the United Kingdom and went to Australia, New Zealand and Canada, or around the world, to try to do well. We Scots were always like that. I am descended from the first Lord Mayor of Melbourne and I was conceived on the beach in Jamaica, so I was told, and which I have reported to your Lordships before.

I do not like this term “common wealth”. At an earlier time, the French always referred to the Commonwealth and thought that the United Kingdom was a republic. I will go back to history in order that we may determine the future by looking at the past. We have had these crises of our economies over time. Perhaps the greatest was in the early 16th century when we had to form the council of trade because our coin was being devalued. That led to what one would today call international development. In those days, it was colonisation. It meant going out to acquire products at the lowest possible price from countries producing things that we needed and sending people out to increase production—whether that was sugar, jute, coir or even minerals.

We have forgotten that we as a nation at the moment have a major balance of trade deficit on manufacturing and that we have to be a worldwide trading nation. We forget, too, that we know these countries and they know us; but over a period of time we forgot what we would now call, as the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, said, “soft power”. We still felt that we had some great economic power when becoming an importing nation which needs to source its products. As noble Lords have pointed out, we have the technology to grow anything, anywhere in the world, at any time. We also have our historic relationships; I felt strongly that people in countries that left to become independent territories should have been treated differently and given Commonwealth passports. While I like the generic term Commonwealth—it has been used in the Commonwealth of Independent States across the board—I believe in the opportunities for bilateral relations.

During my time on various trade boards it was thought a good idea to go out to the colonies to see what they made and what they could produce. We forgot to look back at the records at what we had bought and imported. In my office I have a chart which the Department for Transport—the Ministry of Shipping—gave to me when I was trying to save the shipbuilding industry; it shows the position of His Majesty’s ships at sea and in harbour 14 days after my birth in 1937. It also shows what products we imported from which countries—rubber, flax or whatever. It drew to my attention that we were effectively an importing nation that may add value and re-export, and that is probably where we should come to.

We have the opportunity of being the world’s biggest client of individual Commonwealth countries, even if we have to re-export. You can give an order, an offtake agreement, to those countries in Africa which can produce enormous quantities of food—Sudan, for example, was meant to be the breadbasket of the Arab world—to acquire whatever they can produce. It could then be delivered to a particular port to be loaded on any one of the Commonwealth vessels—and these, as your Lordships know, make up 20,000 of the 90,000 vessels floating on the surface of the earth. The coastline of the Commonwealth is the largest in the world, some 44,000 kilometres.

If we look at those coastlines and we go back to Greenwich—which is of course the centre of the world—and we get a Mercator chart out and look down from the sky above from a satellite, beneath us there is an awful lot of sea, which is itself a great asset. Perhaps we should encourage certain initiatives with members of the Commonwealth countries, not least Her Majesty’s overseas territories, dependencies and islands. We have a normal 200-mile limit in the world. I think each of these countries should now declare a 500-mile limit and lay claim to all the resources that may be within or under the sea. If we look at the map, it shows where the resources are.

We as a country have no future as an insulated island; we have the ability, however, to look at soft power and build rapidly upon these historical relationships with Commonwealth countries provided we can bring an economic issue into the equation which will help their economies.

Libya

Lord Selsdon Excerpts

Friday 1st April 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Selsdon]

My Lords, over my years in your Lordships’ House I have never forgotten the advice that a Chief Whip once gave me: “When you are very unimportant, always have three speeches ready for long debates”. I am not quite sure which of the three speeches I shall use today but I think it will be a rather personal one. I hate a number of words—words that end in “ism”, such as “fundamentalism” and “terrorism”. However, I quite like “tribalism”. Being a MacDonald of the Isles, although I was not there at the time, I think of the massacre of Glencoe.

I have had dealings with the Middle East. I chaired the Middle East trade committee for the Government for 10 years. I was almost always involved with the more difficult countries, which no one wanted to be involved with, such as various parts of Africa, not least Libya. I learnt that in the ancient world of the Mediterranean, you should look back to the past. Obviously, you should go back to the Phoenicians and their three cities of that period, the Numidians and, possibly—coming further forward—to the first aggressive acts that took place with the Barbary pirates. They were from Libya, Algeria and Morocco. In those days—the 1600s—the Barbary pirates used to invade us and the west coast of Ireland, where they would capture whole villages. They even got as far as Iceland, where they had mercenaries. One of their great successes, or so they claimed, was arriving in Penzance one Sunday in 1625 and capturing the entire church congregation, taking it into slavery. Looking at these areas, you find that many of these people from the ancient tribes have become quite important. In Libya, we have a scene of tribalism.

I am not saying that I dislike people who keep citing UN resolutions or talking about international intervention. The most important things about Middle East peace were the Harrogate speech of Lord Home and Resolution 242 for a just and lasting peace in the Middle East. I point out that there are other prejudices. One we heard earlier was that women are not well treated. As your Lordships know well, there were two great women in the Middle East. The first was that remarkable woman, Gertrude Bell, who effectively made peace in Iraq. She was much loved. Rather like one of our great female characters in the Lords, there was Olwen Brogan, an archaeologist who went to Libya after the war in 1947. She remained there in the desert, where she found Leptis Magna and so on. She had the ear of Colonel Gaddafi, who had great respect for her.

How many of us speaking today in your Lordships’ House have been to Libya? Often we speak using second-hand information from other people, including excellent reports from the House of Lords Information Office. However, you often need to have been there to understand things. I hope I will not let myself or the House down in what I am about to say, but I want to explain how some of these things work. If you are a member of a tribe, you often cannot talk to the other tribe—you need an interlocutor. I have had the difficulty of being an interlocutor on these issues, unwillingly and unwittingly. Let us assume that among the problems with Libya is that it really was funding terrorism. This was partly because their flag was green. The colonel, as he was known, used to finance anything green. He financed the Greenham Common peace women when they were trying to get rid of nuclear arms there. I am told that he funded Greenpeace in the interests of peace but I have no evidence of that.

Your Lordships will remember that, as Alanbrooke wrote in his diaries, on 1 March 1941 we lost Benghazi. We then got it back at some point. Your Lordships will remember that we had troops in Libya until, I think, 1970. These are things that we have forgotten. Then Libya started to fund terrorism. There was no doubt that it was funding the IRA because Ireland is green. That may be an excuse or a reason. It was pretty serious stuff. That upset the United States no end, so what does it do? It gets permission from the British to bomb the Libyans from England. This caused a lot of upset and lots of reactions here. I declare an interest as I was in the hotel business and our hotel was empty because the Americans would not come to London. Discussions took place in a hotel in Geneva, or wherever it was, and the Libyans explained that Lockerbie was a reaction to the bombing of their country by the United States and that they intended to bring down an airplane full of American troops. I do not think they ever intended that the airplane should come down somewhere in Scotland. They came to see me to apologise, saying, “My Lord, we did not know that your house was nearby”. They were referring to Galloway House, my old family home that we left years ago.

When the Libyans in the Libyan embassy were attacked by people outside, they opened fire. However, they would not have intended to kill a woman. They apologised for that and wanted to pay blood money. They asked me if I could help in that regard as my mother was Lord Mayor of Westminster at the time. These may seem trite issues but those who think that we are dealing with fairly stupid people do not understand this part of the world—we come back to tribalism. One day I happened to be told that Libyans lived to a great age. My noble friend Lord McColl was involved in Libya in connection with humanitarian operations on his mercy ship, of which the Libyans were very appreciative. I said to him that I had heard that Gaddafi’s father had lived to be 106. At the time my noble friend wanted to talk to someone more important than me—that was perfectly reasonable—but he turned round and said, “Yes, Malcolm, I think if I remember rightly, he could have done. I last operated on him when he was 103 but I cannot remember whether it was the lunar or solar calendar”.

We really have to understand these people. There is tribalism and it will go on. Intervention has to be very carefully thought out. We should respect the fact that it is their country and it is their right to do what they wish with it.

British Overseas Territories

Lord Selsdon Excerpts

Thursday 10th March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Selsdon]

My Lords, at the time of the Statute of Westminster in 1931, before I was born, if I recall it right, one-quarter of the land mass of the world was British. More than that, I believe that we controlled perhaps half of the oceans of the world, having the best and most effective Navy.

I suffer from several weaknesses. I am an islander at heart. I love islands; I love the sea. There are about 70,000 islands in the world, and every territory that we are discussing today is an island. Beyond that, we look at the resources of the sea. I have raised the point in your Lordships' House before that the Commonwealth has the longest coastline in the world at about 44,000 kilometres. I have to declare certain past interests; in my banking days, the bank that employed me was the main correspondent bank in London to the British Dependent Territories. We were always concerned about their future.

When I have my noble friend Lady Hooper, the noble Viscount, Lord Montgomery, the noble Lord, Lord Luce, and others together, I know that these are the professionals in this world. I am only the amateur, and a very gifted one at that, but I love this subject. Therefore, I thought that I might advance a little into the world to make certain suggestions. If what I say is true—that we are still, with the Commonwealth, the most effective and impressive land mass of friends, and have the sea—it is our duty to take initiatives at certain times.

I was brought up to believe that you did not read in your Lordships' House, even with electronic devices, and that you could not even have visual aids, but today, as a bit of support for what I have to say, I have two pieces of paper. One shows little red spots where the territories are. Strategically, they are most extraordinarily presented. If our ancestors planned, as I am sure they did, they would have put points here and said, “This is where we need British representation to the future of the world”.

They were also wise in some ways in making sure that those who wanted to support their initiatives followed certain cultural relationships. For example, if you wish to know which countries have claims in Antarctica, all you need to do is say “rugby”. All countries that play rugby—Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Argentina—have claims in the Falklands, the biggest single land mass. Then you would ask about the origins of these territories. My family mottos are “Per mare, per terras” and “God will provide”, although God is sometimes not as generous as I would have hoped.

On this paper, you see the remarkable name of Bermuda, whose motto is “Whither the Fates carry”. We are being a bit unkind about Bermuda in many ways because we use the phrase “tax havens”. We are coming up to the feast day of St Giuseppe—St Joseph—the patron saint of work. If I recall correctly, the Pope normally at this time delivers an address to one of the Vatican towns on the lines of “man works to live; he does not live to work”.

We have to look at each of these territories and ask where their economic future is. In some way or another, they have carved out a financial services future. Given the comments that have been made about our own financial services sectors in recent years and the losses that have been incurred, I do not think that we should lecture others.

Let us take the simple example of Bermuda, which is the base for most insurance companies. Is there anything wrong in setting up a corporation in a place that has tax advantages, which are of course within the control of the governing body of that country? I am not sure that there is, but I have certain views. Surely, if a nation is overtaxed, it will not be valiant and glorious—I do not know who said that. At one level, we have Bermuda with its significant financial services business, which perhaps is under attack. Other smaller islands with relatively little alternative economies are also classified as tax havens. Perhaps they could be offshore financial centres. Surely, if the majority of these countries are British Dependent Territories, it would not be beyond the realms of possibility for the Government to introduce certain codes of conduct and behaviour, which could be supervised by the Bank of England and could effectively restore confidence.

The right reverend Prelate referred to the Cayman Islands, which has the motto “For he has founded it upon the seas”. However, the only sea business that Cayman can do apart from tourism lies in the turtle sector, but those turtles are now relatively rare. A ban was introduced on, I think, Lusty, that it could no longer produce turtle soup. In all these areas we have to look for alternative uses. I will try to explain to your Lordships that if 70 per cent of the surface of the earth is sea, and we by chance have bits of land stuck in important places and could declare a 1,000-mile exclusion zone or protection zone around all those, we might be able to introduce quite a lot of new business and activities.

We know that the United States has a difficulty when it wishes to go off on military exercises. It does not have many places to land. It is often forbidden from overflying, which is why I have never been supportive of exclusion zones because they are difficult to enforce. Here we have territories, bits of land, located in strategic places. When we look at global warming, we are looking at all sorts of activities for which these bases could be developed for surveillance, for monitoring and even for do-gooding, as it is called. When I chaired a body for sport and recreation for a previous Government, it was suggested to me that, instead of trying to reintroduce national service, we should gather together groups of young men and women and send them off to the dependent territories to do some research and studying. The mottos of some of the territories relate to research and development.

As I speak today I have a certain sense of optimism, but I wonder what the British Government can do. It is not really a question of providing grant aid to many of these places. Under the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002, the one thing that these places have is British citizenship, which should never be taken away. There could or should be some form of collective plan, which I suggest might be advanced under Commonwealth supervision. We know that to this can be added the bailiwicks of Her Majesty’s realms. The dominance of the British culture in the world is demonstrated perhaps by the fact that one-third of all people speak English as their first or second language, or they are learning it. We have certain communication advantages.

I hope that this debate has created certain thoughts and ideas. I am always most grateful to my noble friend Lady Hooper, who has a habit of popping up in most unusual places. When she takes up a cause, those who oppose her should be very careful indeed.