Commonwealth Parliamentary Association

Lord Selsdon Excerpts

Thursday 8th September 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Selsdon]

My Lords, as always, I am extremely grateful to my noble friend Lady Hooper for the way in which she introduces these debates. She is a remarkably dynamic character. As she knows well, dynamics stands for “Do you need a more interesting challenge?”. I have spoken in these debates on many occasions because, in a strange way, I am descended from colonials who failed in the United Kingdom and went to Australia, New Zealand and Canada, or around the world, to try to do well. We Scots were always like that. I am descended from the first Lord Mayor of Melbourne and I was conceived on the beach in Jamaica, so I was told, and which I have reported to your Lordships before.

I do not like this term “common wealth”. At an earlier time, the French always referred to the Commonwealth and thought that the United Kingdom was a republic. I will go back to history in order that we may determine the future by looking at the past. We have had these crises of our economies over time. Perhaps the greatest was in the early 16th century when we had to form the council of trade because our coin was being devalued. That led to what one would today call international development. In those days, it was colonisation. It meant going out to acquire products at the lowest possible price from countries producing things that we needed and sending people out to increase production—whether that was sugar, jute, coir or even minerals.

We have forgotten that we as a nation at the moment have a major balance of trade deficit on manufacturing and that we have to be a worldwide trading nation. We forget, too, that we know these countries and they know us; but over a period of time we forgot what we would now call, as the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, said, “soft power”. We still felt that we had some great economic power when becoming an importing nation which needs to source its products. As noble Lords have pointed out, we have the technology to grow anything, anywhere in the world, at any time. We also have our historic relationships; I felt strongly that people in countries that left to become independent territories should have been treated differently and given Commonwealth passports. While I like the generic term Commonwealth—it has been used in the Commonwealth of Independent States across the board—I believe in the opportunities for bilateral relations.

During my time on various trade boards it was thought a good idea to go out to the colonies to see what they made and what they could produce. We forgot to look back at the records at what we had bought and imported. In my office I have a chart which the Department for Transport—the Ministry of Shipping—gave to me when I was trying to save the shipbuilding industry; it shows the position of His Majesty’s ships at sea and in harbour 14 days after my birth in 1937. It also shows what products we imported from which countries—rubber, flax or whatever. It drew to my attention that we were effectively an importing nation that may add value and re-export, and that is probably where we should come to.

We have the opportunity of being the world’s biggest client of individual Commonwealth countries, even if we have to re-export. You can give an order, an offtake agreement, to those countries in Africa which can produce enormous quantities of food—Sudan, for example, was meant to be the breadbasket of the Arab world—to acquire whatever they can produce. It could then be delivered to a particular port to be loaded on any one of the Commonwealth vessels—and these, as your Lordships know, make up 20,000 of the 90,000 vessels floating on the surface of the earth. The coastline of the Commonwealth is the largest in the world, some 44,000 kilometres.

If we look at those coastlines and we go back to Greenwich—which is of course the centre of the world—and we get a Mercator chart out and look down from the sky above from a satellite, beneath us there is an awful lot of sea, which is itself a great asset. Perhaps we should encourage certain initiatives with members of the Commonwealth countries, not least Her Majesty’s overseas territories, dependencies and islands. We have a normal 200-mile limit in the world. I think each of these countries should now declare a 500-mile limit and lay claim to all the resources that may be within or under the sea. If we look at the map, it shows where the resources are.

We as a country have no future as an insulated island; we have the ability, however, to look at soft power and build rapidly upon these historical relationships with Commonwealth countries provided we can bring an economic issue into the equation which will help their economies.