Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting

Lord Hylton Excerpts

Monday 17th October 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

My noble friend is right. There are 106 recommendations in the EPG report and many more in the Commonwealth Ministerial Action Group report. There are funding implications for the Secretariat and for the machinery of the Commonwealth, and we are looking at those very carefully. We will have to evaluate them and decide what we can do, given the inevitable limits of resources. One also has to remember that a large part of the Commonwealth is both bilateral between Commonwealth countries and, even more important, separate from government. The unique nature of the Commonwealth is its huge latticework of professional, business, scientific, medical and judicial relationships that exist in no other multinational organisation. Those, too, will need to be developed and encouraged.

[Lord Hylton]

My Lords, does the noble Lord agree that bilateral relations between India and Pakistan have been frozen into almost Cold War attitudes ever since those nations came into being? Would the Perth meeting not be a very good opportunity for getting them to thaw out a little?

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

One naturally hopes and, indeed, urges that the Commonwealth can provide an envelope in which to resolve tensions of that kind between countries which, although fellow members of the Commonwealth, may have very different agendas—indeed, even hostility to each other—but that issue is obviously between the two countries concerned. Their highest representatives will be at Perth; I hope that they can get together at that and other opportunities to resolve the problems that face those two great nations.