Commonwealth

Lord Crisp Excerpts

Thursday 17th October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Crisp (CB)]

My Lords, I wanted to take part in this debate more to listen than to speak, and I have been wonderfully rewarded so far. I come at this as rather a newcomer to the Commonwealth, or to the issues of the Commonwealth, although, of course, I was born a Commonwealth citizen. A lot of people in this country do not pay a great deal of attention to the Commonwealth. I have been paying attention to it only since I started working in health in Africa in the past few years. I shall say a few words about health, following my noble friend Lord Kakkar.

My first point is about links. As the noble Lord, Lord Luce, said in his excellent speech, there is a kaleidoscope of links between our country and all the Commonwealth countries. I was in Uganda yesterday for the launch of the Uganda UK health alliance, which brings together about 200 British organisations working in health in Uganda. The speech given by the Minister of Health there was very much about our shared legacy, our friendship and what we can do together and the future. Anyone who works in health in Africa will be aware of the painful legacy of colonialism that is still there, but the mood music is very much about the shared future that we have together.

If, in Uganda, there are 300-plus links between hospitals, schools and churches, all working on the desperate health problems of countries like Uganda, we can see how many links there are around the world and how important they are. I chair Sightsavers—its proper name is the Royal Commonwealth Society for the Blind—so am involved with a great deal of other links around the world. I was delighted to hear what the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Scotland, said about the Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Trust and its approach to eliminating some of the avoidable blindness in the Commonwealth. That would be a most remarkable impact.

In addition to the wealth of links that bind us all together, the Commonwealth is a truly remarkable organisation because it brings together rich countries, poor countries and fast-growing countries, and it is not geographically bounded. It is important to Africa. As my noble friend Lord Kakkar has already mentioned, the Commonwealth Health Ministers Meeting is one of the great meetings for Health Ministers in Africa. They see it as an opportunity to influence the agenda because they are sitting down together with rich countries and having a major impact. In parenthesis, I very much support the noble Lord’s proposal which was made there, and would be interested to hear what the Minister has to say about that.

The Commonwealth is also important to us on health. It gives us access to learning and development of all kinds of approaches to health around the world. It is based on a shared history and largely shared values. I say “largely shared values” because I am very conscious of the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Black, and others about, for example, the attitudes in some countries towards gay men and women, and to women in some others.

The single point I really want to make on this is that it is a rapidly changing world. We in the UK have our traditional ways of doing things, but we can learn from people without our resources—particularly in health—about how to do things differently, and how you use the community, to take that example from Africa, in things such as health and education in ways which we simply do not do in this country. It is in our interest to promote these links and the Commonwealth more generally, both for that self-interest and for our co-development with our partners in the Commonwealth.

Finally, I come back to the people-to-people aspects which the noble Lord, Lord Luce, mentioned right at the beginning of the debate. We underplay the Commonwealth. I am not at all unusual in not having thought much about the Commonwealth at all beyond, perhaps, the Commonwealth Games and a few other things like that. It has been, to put it slightly rudely, something that the enthusiasts have understood, and if you know about the Commonwealth you know about the Commonwealth. The profile needs to be raised in many different ways, as the noble Lord, Lord Luce, again said. With that comes the scope for greater shared growth and development in a wide range of different countries.