Commonwealth and Commonwealth Charter

Lord Williams of Oystermouth Excerpts

Thursday 7th March 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Williams of Oystermouth]

I echo the gratitude expressed by other noble Lords to the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, for securing this discussion on a profoundly significant and timely question. It is a particular privilege to begin my recycled life in your Lordships’ House by speaking on this subject.

I note, as have other noble Lords, the wholly distinctive character of the Commonwealth as a family of independent nations allied not primarily for military, or even economic, security but by a shared history that has been translated into a shared vision of ethical politics. The proposed Commonwealth Charter, which has rightly been so warmly welcomed, sets out the main lines of this ethical vision with clarity and force and we must all hope that it will work as an unambiguous point of reference in dealing with crises and failures in the life of individual Commonwealth states, to which reference has already been made.

I draw special attention to the points made about the eradication of all kinds of discrimination—especially today mentioning discrimination against women—a properly pluralistic and transparent political culture, environmental priorities and the protection of more vulnerable states. In short, the charter defines an impressive project that deserves the strongest support from this country and its Government. For this project to be realised, a number of commitments on the part of the United Kingdom will need to be honoured and developed. The extensive support given to Commonwealth students, not least through DfID and the FCO, remains a key element in this. I was very much encouraged to hear the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, underlining this in his opening remarks.

We could enumerate the fruits of these exchanges at length, but perhaps the most important thing to note is the way in which Commonwealth students can be equipped to promote a transparent and accountable political culture in their own contexts, in large part by the experience that they gain here of active civil society networks. Even where it is a matter of students coming from so-called developed countries in the Commonwealth, there is still an agenda of building and cementing partnerships and learning to collaborate effectively in support of the more vulnerable members of the family. We should therefore applaud the support given as part of our development programme to such student opportunities and keep a sharp eye out for any suggestion that there are easy economies to be made by reducing these. That would be a very short-term view: if we indeed want a stable and just international environment, the Commonwealth will play its part by fostering cadres of young leaders with a strong commitment to civil society and human rights.

We need to keep under review those aspects of our Border Agency activities which may impinge negatively on the welcome offered to those who come from the Commonwealth to study, a point touched upon by the right reverend Prelate, the Bishop of Leicester. This does not apply only to students. Is it really appropriate, for example, that a respected academic from a developed Commonwealth country should be required to provide for the central administration an account of every trip that he or she makes away from their academic base? I refer to a case that has lately become somewhat notorious in Cambridge. Similarly, the immense complications that attend the visa system for many who plan short-stay study trips or attendance at conferences or training events in the UK have not done much to win hearts and minds. I think back to the hours spent by former colleagues at Lambeth Palace arguing about the bona fides of bishops and others from Commonwealth nations seeking to attend church gatherings here. I do not suggest that there is a quick fix to these concerns, only that the current situation maximises the possibilities of embarrassment and unfairness and needs constant monitoring and review.

I move briefly to a second point. The Commonwealth Charter’s clarity about transparency and the vision of what a moment ago I called a stable and just international environment should combine to prompt some continuing questions about the effectiveness of tax governance in Commonwealth countries. Effective and fair taxation would be agreed by all of us to be a cornerstone of good political governance and social stability, and that point has been underlined very strongly in a recent Commonwealth Secretariat paper. Christian Aid, of which I have the honour to be chair-designate, has estimated that $160 billion are lost annually to developing economies worldwide, many of them Commonwealth states, because of the evasion of local tax by multinational interests. At the same time, ironically, a significant number of Commonwealth states and British Overseas Territories function as tax havens, and so compound those problems.

Her Majesty’s Government have given welcome signs of concern about these matters and they will be on the agenda for the next G8 meeting. I trust that others will join me in hoping that the Government will bring some pressure to bear within the Commonwealth itself on these matters, looking to a commitment to better sharing of information on hidden assets and perhaps raising the matter at this year’s Overseas Territories Joint Ministerial Council.

Those issues represent wide cross-party concern; but more importantly for today, they are entirely in line with the vision so eloquently set out in the Commonwealth Charter. The potential of our Commonwealth to be a beacon of equitable practice is very great, and the will is manifestly there. I trust that today’s debate may assist us towards a future in which we may continue to be proud of our unique Commonwealth family as a model of both cultural diversity and moral convergence in our world.

Social Policy

Lord Williams of Oystermouth Excerpts

Wednesday 16th June 2010 Lords Chamber

[The Archbishop of Canterbury]

My Lords, I must begin with an apology to your Lordships for the fact that an inflexible diary means that I must infringe the convention of this House by not being able to guarantee that I shall be here at the end of this debate. I am truly sorry for that, but I wish to be here to support my right reverend brother and to congratulate him on securing this significant debate, and I am eager to hear the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Wei.

As has already been said, this is a timely debate. We are at a point where a debate about the nature of citizenship is perhaps more important than it has been for a century or more. To engage in such a debate about the nature of citizenship is also, and inevitably, to open the door to a deeper debate, that is no less necessary, about the very nature of how we define the human person. We have begun to learn that being a citizen is not simply a matter of being an abstract or passive possessor of certain claims or rights. A citizen is not simply someone who votes. A citizen is someone who exercises active political virtue.

The state does not, of course, make people virtuous, but it would be a great mistake to deduce from that axiom that the state therefore has no interest in the business of virtue. The state protects us from acts that outrage human dignity. The state is able to conduct its business on the assumption that citizens will know their business. Rights in the law are there to safeguard dignity, but that dignity does not look after itself. The state and the law need something more than statutory enactment alone to give substance to how we regard one another and to what is owed to one another. The state requires communities in which human beings are taken seriously in certain ways. At the very simplest level, as we have already been reminded, that grows out of the mutual recognition within manageable communities and within relations and transactions that my neighbour’s interests are comparable to my own. It grows out of that most basic of all social institutions: promise keeping. At its fullest, it grows out of a sense of the depth and multidimensionality of the human person, which takes me back to my opening point about how discussion of citizenship opens out into discussion of the human person.

If all that sounds very abstract, let me illustrate with a story from my experience. During my time working in the Church in Wales, I was privileged to be a witness to and, on one or two occasions, involved in the life of a community in the Rhondda valley called Penrhys. It was probably the most deprived of the many deprived council estates in the Rhondda. It was a community scarred by third-generation unemployment and by the general sense that it was the place where people who had been forgotten by every imaginable statutory authority had been left to rot.

John Morgans, Moderator of the United Reformed Church in Wales, retired from his post of ecclesiastical leadership to go and live on the Penrhys estate with his family. Over a couple of decades he built up a unique and extraordinary partnership on the Penrhys estate: Penrhys New Perspectives. During that time the partnership which he created was able to engage in a programme to create 100 new small businesses. It was able to open an effective health centre on an estate which hitherto had had none. It was able to work with the grain of a community which hardly knew it was a community until someone was there with a level of commitment and patience that enabled people to see themselves afresh.

The difference that was made in that context had everything to do with the patience that John Morgans and his associates showed, because it takes time to discover that you are a community. One of the greatest difficulties which we have faced in this area in the past couple of decades has, of course, very often been a regime of funding for projects in such contexts that has been experienced as brutally short term. I would like to leave with your Lordships, and especially with the Minister, the question of whether that should be reviewed as a matter of urgency as we move forward.

It is not only about funding regimes and short-termism; it is precisely about the presence of certain people in certain small communities who allow the wider community to see themselves afresh and to feel that they are being taken seriously. John Morgans was able to do what he did in Penrhys because people trusted him, because he understood their language and because he was seen as someone who had no sectional interest to pursue in that community, but was able and free to broker the interests of all those involved. That is of course where the role of many communities of faith comes into this question, not least the role of the established church, which has that long-term, non-negotiable commitment to presence in local communities. It is one of those institutions which is not going to go away—perhaps, in many of our contexts, the only one.

Healthy citizenship grows out of a sense that your voice is worth hearing. You will discover that your voice is worth hearing when you are listened to. You are listened to most effectively—most transformingly—in those local contexts about which we have already heard so much. We have been reminded from both sides of your Lordships’ House of the folly of any mythology which supposes that central government can dictate to local priorities and stifle them and rob them of their vitality. We are interested in a citizenship that is more than passive. It is about more than what is due to me, but is about what I positively want, and not simply what I want for myself but what I recognise as wanted by my neighbours; a citizenship which recognises that my happiness is involved with the happiness of my neighbour. I was very pleased indeed to hear the quotation from the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, about neighbourliness as a factor in this situation.

So the partnership which we are beginning to talk about here is to do with a shared discernment of what we want together, of the happiness which we recognise is bound up with the happiness of one another. It is not, I need hardly remind your Lordships, the state’s business to define happiness. But neither is happiness simply a private issue of a set of individual satisfactions.

In supporting the coalitions of shared interest at the local level, the state discovers substance in the idea of human dignity, and it educates people to a wider and wider view of what solidarity and shared human happiness are about. Out of the kinds of partnership we have begun to discuss this afternoon there emerges that wider sense of common interest both nationally and internationally—not the least of our concerns at the moment—which enables people to see themselves not only as activists in one local community, not only even as citizens of one particular nation, but as people who take responsibility and share responsibility for human welfare on the widest front. Just as importantly, effective partnership builds the skills that are needed for brokering and forwarding that process. It is a process which has its own feedback to learn locally in partnership and in community. What it is to define shared interest and common happiness is also to find the skills you need to keep it alive.

In conclusion, I want to quote from the words of the sociologist, Richard Sennett, who is an exponent, it is perhaps worth saying, of what some would still refer to as associational socialism, which might be rather different from the centralist socialism that has been spoken of already. In his book, The Culture of the New Capitalism, he writes that,

“a good polity is one in which all citizens believe they are bound together in a common project”.

That he distinguishes from what he refers to as the “iron cage of solidarity”, a solidarity which leaves no room for intention, action, transformation and, as I referred to earlier, that depth and multidimensionality of human persons without which no society—local, national or international—can hope for any health.