---

Commonwealth

My Lords, we are all grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Freeman, for choosing this topic for debate. His choice is timely in the light of the Malta CHOGM conference to be held shortly. I want to speak briefly on three or four issues. First, I strongly agree with the noble Lord on the importance of education, in particular what the Centre for Commonwealth Education is going to do. The centre is the result of a commitment made at the last CHOGM. I know that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe of Aberavon, will talk about the difficulties surrounding the financing of the centre because of certain problems at the Commonwealth Institute. I shall leave that issue to him, but I flag up the likelihood that there will be problems sustaining the centre unless care is taken to do something about it right now. Secondly, I turn with sadness to the earthquake that has affected both sides of Kashmir and north-west Pakistan. It has been a severe and major disaster for the area. Relief operations are continuing and we have seen on our televisions how hard life there is going to be. The only matter I want to mention at this stage is that when the time comes to begin reconstruction, given that we now know how sensitive the region is to earthquakes, I hope that DfID and the other bodies concerned will take note and ensure that the new housing built there will be robust against such shocks in the future. Technology is available which can be used to build earthquake-proof houses. They should be used in the reconstruction effort, rather than build new stock which will fall down again. We should take care to utilise the latest and best technology. Like many other things, the earthquake has had one or two good consequences, one of which has been the opening up of the Line of Control between the Indian and the Pakistani sides of Kashmir. It is only an emergency measure, but help in the relief work has also been coming from India to Pakistan. If in some way encouragement can be given at the Malta conference to the governments of India and Pakistan to keep the Line of Control open and to increase the exchange of people across the two borders, those would be welcome steps. There has been a thaw in relations between India and Pakistan on the question of Kashmir. The Indian Government have been consulting groups based in Kashmir itself on the Indian side who have been fighting for an autonomous Kashmir. That, too, marks a big step forward. We need to sustain this improved relationship and do everything we can to increase the wealth of the people of Kashmir on both sides. I say that because the earthquake has demonstrated clearly that, whoever may be in the right in this dispute, the people of Kashmir are suffering. They have been neglected in terms of infrastructure, housing and so on and now is an opportunity for all of us to do much better. I hope that, without in any way interfering in the bilateral negotiations between India and Pakistan in regard to a settlement of their disputes, we will do as much as we can to help that process along. As the noble Lord, Lord Freeman, quite rightly mentioned—I am summarising what he said—the Commonwealth is unique in that it is a global body. It is almost like a miniature, although better, version of the United Nations. This allows issues such as the millennium development goals to be pursued much more carefully and intensively at Commonwealth level than at the full United Nations level. I expect my noble friend will tell me from the Dispatch Box that attempts are made to monitor the progress of Commonwealth MDGs. We should have reports periodically from the Commonwealth on how well we are doing in that regard. The noble Lord, Lord Freeman, said that the Commonwealth shares cricket but that there are other things to share. I cannot say that there could be better things to share than cricket. Perhaps every CHOGM should coincide with a big cricket match between England and the rest of the world.