The Modern Commonwealth: Opportunities and Challenges

Lord Swire Excerpts

Thursday 7th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[James Duddridge]

I thank my hon. Friend for that and extend thanks to Jon Davies and his team of 30 people who work here in the UK, off Westminster Hall, and overseas.

To give an idea of the volume of activity, in 2017-18 there were 15 outbound delegations, 35 inbound delegations and nine multilateral delegations. As I look around the Chamber, I see people who have been involved in inbound and outbound trips in the last month. There have been trips to Fiji, the Seychelles, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. The CPA was also very much involved in election observing, particularly in the overseas territories. As a committee, we have formed our strategic priorities. We decided that we could not do everything exceptionally well, so we are concentrating on five key themes: women in Parliament, public finance scrutiny, modern slavery, trade and security.

This debate is about opportunities and challenges facing the modern Commonwealth in its 70th year—“modern” because the Commonwealth existed in various guises before the 1949 London declaration, but it was a free association of independent member countries. Quite how we got away with that as part of the European Union, I do not know. Crucially, the Commonwealth gave an equal say to all its 53 members, regardless of size—at one end is India, with a population of 1.3 billion, and at the other is Nauru, with a population of only 13,000. Of the states, 31 have populations of fewer than 1.5 million and five have populations of fewer than 1 million.

They are nations all around the globe. There are 19 in Africa, which I know and love well, and others are in parts of the world that I know less well, with seven countries in Asia, 13 in the Caribbean and the Americas, three here in Europe and 11 in the Pacific. It is so popular, and it is expanding, to Cameroon, Mozambique and Rwanda—more of Rwanda later. It was good to see the Gambia come back into the Commonwealth in February 2018, and I was able to travel there.

[Sir Hugo Swire (East Devon) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that one of the most welcome developments in the Commonwealth’s expansion in the past 70 years is that its members now include countries that have no historical links with the United Kingdom, such as Mozambique and Rwanda?

[James Duddridge]

Absolutely. That shows the strength of the Commonwealth. It is of course Her Majesty who leads the Commonwealth and makes the final decision, before they come in, on whether such countries share the same values, but it is certainly an expanding and very diverse organisation. I have mentioned that Her Majesty the Queen is the head of the Commonwealth, and we also have the secretary-general, Baroness Scotland, leading its work.

It is Commonwealth Day on Monday. It is always in the second week of March each year, and I asked myself why? It was the Canadians’ idea. They wanted the Commonwealth to be about the future and about young people, and they wanted it to be celebrated by schoolchildren. They worked out that we have different term times all around the world, but the most likely time when all children will be in school is the second week of March, and that is why we celebrate it at that particular time.

Here in the UK, there will be a week of celebrations, including at Westminster Abbey and Marlborough House. There will be cultural events, civic events and school events. Flags will be raised across the United Kingdom, and there will be some street parties. Anyone who has not invited me to their street party should feel free to email me at the House of Commons.

One of the big issues in the Commonwealth recently has been the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting, where all 53 members come together. There are normally one or two that, for various domestic reasons, cannot make it. It was particularly good to see Prime Minister Modi of India at CHOGM here. CHOGM is not a one-off event: the country that hosts CHOGM is then responsible for the operations leading up to the next one in two years’ time. We are passing the mantle from London to the Rwandans in Kigali.

One of the things I very much hope to do is to work with the Rwandans to have a Commonwealth forum. CHOGM is dominated by the Executives, and we in the UK felt that parliamentarians should lobby the Executives. Parliamentarians from around the Commonwealth came together to talk, and then went back to our Executives before CHOGM to lay out the issues we cared about, and that was powerful. It was not perfect, and we have lessons to learn on what we did with the parliamentary forum. Almost 50 parliamentarians met about a month before CHOGM here in the UK, and this is something we would like the Rwandans to do.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Hugo Swire (East Devon) (Con)]

“Hear, hear” to the concluding statements of the hon. Member for City of Durham (Dr Blackman-Woods), with which I completely concur.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Rochford and Southend East (James Duddridge). I would like to think that it was our joint time in the Foreign Office that gave us a deep respect and a certain understanding of the Commonwealth. Being Minister for the Commonwealth for over four years was one of the most enjoyable parts of my political career to date. I was, however, always aware that one had constantly to remind the Foreign Office that it is the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. While I am enormously pleased to be taking part in this debate before Commonwealth Day, which falls on Monday, I regret and lament the fact that we do not debate the Commonwealth more regularly. It is not something that we should pick up and dust down once a year; it is something that we should embrace and encourage. The Commonwealth is only as good as its constituent members and we have a lead to give. I do wish this place would take the Commonwealth a little bit more seriously.

When I left the Foreign Office, I wanted to continue doing something for the Commonwealth, so I took on the deputy chairmanship of the Commonwealth Enterprise and Investment Council—I refer Members to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. In the time available this afternoon, I want to focus on some of the economic issues surrounding the Commonwealth. I think the opportunities are huge, although I agree with my hon. Friend; I would never think that trade with the Commonwealth could replace trade with Europe. It is an “also”, not an “instead of”. I made that point during the debate on Brexit, at a time when I was arguing for remain. We would be foolish to ignore the statistics for the Commonwealth, because it is so self-evidently in our interest to take it all a bit more seriously.

While the growth of the populations and the GDP of the United States, the EU, China and our other traditional partners has been stagnating, Commonwealth economies continue to grow, along with the disposable income of their consumers. Let us take, for example, Commonwealth Africa, which is dear to my hon. Friend’s heart. Since 2000, GDP growth in sub-Saharan African nations has been much faster than the global average and the growth of the more prosperous north African nations, with the IMF projecting the region’s GDP to have increased by 468% between 2000 and 2022—a staggering statistic. The African Development Bank estimates that Africa’s middle class has grown to 350 million since 2010, with private consumption increasing by an average of 3.7% year on year in the same period. Consumer spending is estimated to account for 50% to 60% of the growth in Africa’s economy and is expected to rise from $680 billion in 2008 to $2.2 trillion by 2030.

That is just Commonwealth Africa. Let us move across and look at Commonwealth India. India has outpaced China to become the world’s fastest-growing economy. According to the United Nations, its population is projected to overtake that of China by 2022. In the eight years culminating in 2012, the size of India’s middle-class population is estimated to have doubled, to 600 million. Between 1990 and 2015, the number of households with a disposable income of more than US $10,000 has risen twentyfold, to nearly 50 million, and its middle-class population is predicted to overtake that of China, the US and the EU by 2027. That is manifestly good, both in terms of addressing the issues of poverty and in the opportunities that that presents for British companies and exports.

The UK recorded a trade surplus of £7 billion with the Commonwealth in 2017. UK exports of goods and services to the Commonwealth stand at £56.3 billion. UK imports from the Commonwealth stand at £49.3 billion and the UK has recorded a trade surplus with the Commonwealth every year since 2010. The problem, and one of the challenges, is that India, Canada, Australia, Singapore and South Africa currently account for 71% of the UK’s total trade with the Commonwealth. I would like to see total trade grow, obviously, but I would also like to see it much more widely spread right across the Commonwealth.

In 2020, as my hon. Friend pointed out, we have the next Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Rwanda. In addition there will be the Commonwealth Business Forum, which, I am pleased to say, the Commonwealth Enterprise and Investment Council will again be organising. That is a huge opportunity to truly display the strengths and the potential of often-overlooked Commonwealth markets. Rwanda should be praised for its commitment to gender equality—that is important after our previous debate. Only Iceland compares to Rwanda’s gender pay gay. No other country’s Parliament approaches Rwanda’s gender balance of 68% female MPs, and 26% of Rwandan small and medium-sized enterprises are run by women. Those statistics would also have stood well in the previous debate.

Rwanda also ranks within Africa’s four least corrupt nations, according to Transparency International, placing it—amazingly—above Italy. When we think where Rwanda has come from, that is a truly extraordinary position for it to be in. To say nothing else, the fact that such an independently successful nation with no historical connection to the United Kingdom or the Commonwealth would choose to join the organisation as recently as 2009 speaks to the understood value of the union to those who take advantage of it. I am always particularly pleased that the French are always looking at the Commonwealth to see how they can do their equivalent—which is a poor equivalent—better.

The question that we all have to ask ourselves is one that we should ask ourselves of everything: if something does not exist, should we invent it? Should we invent the Commonwealth, if it did not exist? I think that not only should we invent it, but we should spend much more time talking about and supporting it. I believe that the opportunities are huge. We can do more for the smaller Commonwealth nations, representing them at the UN on the Security Council. When we leave the EU, there will still be two EU countries—Cyprus and Malta—that are also Commonwealth countries. The United Kingdom must be careful not to over-dominate the Commonwealth, but at the same time it must show leadership. The potential is absolutely huge. This is a Commonwealth of nations of people who wish one another good will, who wish to share education and values, and who want to trade with one another. We can do much, much more and it is in our interests so to do.