UK–Commonwealth Trading Relationship

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Thursday 8th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, we should guard against sentimentality. It is a particular temptation when discussing this association of nations to which we are bound by language, law, culture, kinship, history and habit. It is almost impossible if you are in this country not to be slightly misty-eyed when we think of the two great global conflagrations of the 20th century and of the millions of young men who rushed from every corner of the Commonwealth and Empire to take up arms, in many cases for a country on which they had never set eyes, because they believed in our shared values.

Yet, as my noble friend Lord Howell says—correctly and wisely quoting Her Majesty the Queen—the Commonwealth is the face of the future. The case for it is not nostalgic or sentimental. At some point in this decade, the Commonwealth’s GDP will overtake that of the European Union. We live in an age when geographical proximity has never mattered less. In the 1950s, it may have made sense to form regional trade blocs, but many of those arguments were broken down by advances in containerisation, travel and the internet, and have been accelerated by our experience in the past 15 months in lockdown. We are now all much more accustomed to having sensitive commercial conversations over Zoom and Teams, so the case for cultural proximity rather than accident of geography has never been more eloquent.

There is one other form of nostalgia that I have heard in this debate. Perhaps I am wrong, but I cannot help feeling that, as with all our global trade deals, some noble Lords are still a little bit resentful about our withdrawal from the European Union and are looking for pegs on which to hang their opposition. We heard a little bit of it from the Front Bench—perhaps we will hear some more from the Front Bench spokesmen who will close this debate—when noble Lords talked about the importance of not trading with countries that do not meet our food production standards. There has been one major divergence post Brexit between British and EU food production standards: the decision recently announced by the EU to allow some animals to be fed on bits of other animals. We can argue about whether that was a good thing but clearly those noble Lords who have been arguing—and perhaps are planning to argue again today—that we should not trade with countries that have lower food production standards than ours must therefore be prepared to argue that we should not have a trade deal with the European Union. I hope that they will not erect barriers vis-à-vis the rest of the world that they would not erect against Brussels.

Let me close by saying that the Commonwealth is not just a voluntary association. By virtue of being voluntary, it brings out the best in all its members. It encourages us all to live our best lives and any strengthening of the Commonwealth must therefore be reckoned a net augmentation of human happiness.