Lord Triesman
Main Page: Lord Triesman (Labour - Life peer)
Lord Triesman (Lab) [V]
My Lords, I too declare my interest as a former Commonwealth Minister, and I thank the noble Lord, Lord Howell, for initiating this debate. It is also a pleasure to follow the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans.
I start by wishing all of us well, here and in the Commonwealth, in our trade relationships. I do not think you could create the Commonwealth today; it is a unique organisation, and it has deepened its relationships with all its members in so many ways. I also want to say that the noble Lord, Lord Grimstone, is a very fine ambassador for trade.
But our optimism about it needs to be tempered by some realism, particularly as we want to see global developments in trade. The noble Viscount, Lord Waverley, used the term “geopolitical proximity”, and that is always a genuine issue. I just want to make the point that distances cannot be dismissed lightly. According to the Library briefing, the average distance by air from London of our top 10 trading nations in the Commonwealth is 9,601 kilometres. The average for the top 10 of our former EU partners is 1,020 kilometres—and that is by road, which means that the delivery of goods is significant. We are looking at 9.4 times the distances we have traditionally looked at. That is significant because our trade is largely in goods, not so much in services. We use shipping. We have seen that even one ship in the Suez Canal can create considerable difficulties. Most shipping is using bunker fuel and emitting huge amounts of sulphur into the atmosphere. These are all important factors we need to overcome.
The interconnectivity the noble Lord, Lord Howell, refers to is of course absolutely real, but it is universal. The interconnectivity is not just with the Commonwealth but with all other countries, none of which sleep in the world of this interconnectivity. But even interconnectivity is not unproblematic. It is a huge source of business, of course, but we know now that it is an even greater source of fraud—not insurmountable, but a real factor.
I just want to finish on the Covid point, which has been made so well by my noble friend Lady Chapman. It is a really serious matter. Forty-four million people in the Commonwealth have been infected—130,000 more each day. There have been 700,000 deaths, growing by 1% per day. Vaccines so far have got to about 1% of the population of Africa, and that really does mean that the people are suffering in all the ways we know about medically but also in their ability to construct and reconstruct and build their economies. If we have a serious approach to this, we will deal with it.
Finally, but not as an afterthought, I applaud what the noble Lord, Lord Risby, just said. When I was Minister for the Commonwealth, I also thought associate membership would be very important and that Algeria would be a prime candidate.