Commonwealth and Commonwealth Charter

Lord Empey Excerpts

Thursday 7th March 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Empey]

My Lords, I wanted to address a couple of issues this afternoon, the first being the economic dimension to the Commonwealth. As we have heard from many speeches, approximately one-third of humanity is engaged in the Commonwealth and it very largely shares with people and businesses in this country a common language and very similar approaches to law. Among these diverse countries are those that are extremely rich in natural resources, such as Australia, Canada and many parts of Africa, and many that are growing fast, particularly in Asia and Africa. It seems reasonable that if this country has a connection with many of those countries, while in no way is it a substitute for our membership of the European Union, surely it should be another string to our bow.

At the beginning of our membership of the European Union we turned our back on many of our former trading partners in the Commonwealth. Some felt great resentment and at that stage it was not necessarily in our economic interests. It most certainly is not in our economic interests today. We should pursue, as hard as we can, the economic development of the Commonwealth, because just as the founders of the European Union had it in their minds that strengthening economic co-operation would also go a long way to preventing conflict, similarly economic development in the Commonwealth can also help to eliminate conflict. As we heard from the noble Lords, Lord Black and Lord Anderson, there are things that are far from perfect, and I welcome the charter. It is a very fine foundation upon which to build.

The second issue, referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Howell, is the possible membership of the Commonwealth by the Irish Republic. This is something I would strongly welcome and I ask the Minister if this issue has been raised by Her Majesty’s Government with the Irish Government. If we go back some 30 years to 1982, there was considerable conflict at that time with the Falklands war and others. It was Sir Shridath Ramphal, then the Secretary-General of the Commonwealth, who implored Ireland, as he put it, to “come home” to the Commonwealth of nations.

The Commonwealth consists of 54 nations, more than 60% of which are republics. It is no longer, as the Minister said, the British Commonwealth; it is the Commonwealth. Given the diversity of countries, given the new charter, given the fact that the majority of members are republics and given the commonality of history and all that goes with it, it seems to me that it could go a long way towards putting on an even stronger foundation the relationship between this country and the Republic of Ireland, taking its place in the Commonwealth of nations, which will, I believe, be a very strong trading bloc as well as a strong soft-power bloc diplomatically throughout the world. It would strengthen relationships within these islands.

While some would see the Republic joining the Commonwealth as some way of assuaging the views of unionists who might then feel less likely to object to being part of a united Ireland, I can assure your Lordships as a unionist that that is not the case. But that does not mean that we should not do anything and everything in our power to strengthen our relationships and help to build what has the potential to be one of the biggest and most successful trading and economic blocs in the world.

The charter would offend nobody in the Irish Republic; it would be entirely consistent with its long-held views and expressions; and there is no military involvement whatever. Given the progress that has been made in the past 15 years—we are coming up to the 15th anniversary of the signing of the Belfast agreement next month—this could be a further step that we could take together. I hope that people in the Republic will give significant consideration to taking this step.