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Commonwealth

My Lords, I join with those who have spoken in thanking my noble friend Lord Freeman for giving us this opportunity. I decline, if I may, the opportunity to answer the question just posed by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Chesterton, but I follow his example with a little reminiscence about one’s own associations with the Commonwealth. Mine go back, I am afraid, to when I was nine years old. Like all those who attended Sunday school at Carmel chapel in Aberavon, I was given a card with a message from His Majesty King George V on his Silver Jubilee. I still have it, although I could not possibly find it. On it was the sentence,"““I ask you to remember that in the days to come you will be the citizens of a great empire””." Little did I imagine then that I would be lucky enough, 11 or 12 years later, to spend two years serving in east Africa with African troops, most of whom, as the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig, has illustrated, served in the East African Division in the Burma campaign, some of whom came to Britain for the victory parade, and some of whom I tried to instruct in my limited Swahili about the difference between Bwana ““Kingy George”” and Bwana Joe Stalin. Some 40 years later, I had scarcely dreamt that I should be attending my first CHOGM meeting in New Delhi in 1983 alongside my noble friend Lady Thatcher. My noble friend Lord Freeman has said everything about the quality of discussion in those meetings: open, candid and constructive as nowhere else in the world, between representatives of every kind of sample of the human race. We discussed Grenada from very different points of view, but not challenging the conclusion offered by the then Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew: that the Americans ought not to have done it, but he was glad they did. Only the Commonwealth could produce that kind of judgment. Most impressively, my noble friend Lady Thatcher, in dialogue with Indira Gandhi and Julius Nyerere, was able to persuade them of her genuine commitment to progress in the search for nuclear disarmament. My noble friend Lord Freeman touched on a feature that has always struck me as valuable. When I went from Commonwealth finance ministers’ meetings to meetings of the International Monetary Fund, I think I had an understanding of the problems of the rest of the world that was not available to other finance ministers—not least the Secretary of the Treasury of the United States. I hope that the House will forgive me if I turn from those general observations to a much smaller issue—namely, the position of the Commonwealth Institute, as trailed by the noble Lord, Lord Desai. As the House will know, it was founded in 1886 for the benefit of education in what was then the Empire, and is now the Commonwealth. It now faces a wholly unmanageable conflict between its commitments and aspirations and its resources. I am not concerned to allocate responsibility for the present unsatisfactory situation, some of which rests upon me. My noble friend Lord Hurd has observed that it is a story from which none of us emerges with great credit. I am anxious only to help us find the right way forward with the aid of the Government. The commitment of the institute is very specific—and was endorsed by Heads of Government at the CHOGM meeting in 2003—namely, the establishment in Cambridge of the centre for commonwealth education, to which the noble Lord, Lord Desai, referred. Two years later that project is still hanging fire. That cannot be reconciled with the resources available to the institute, if any are available. It has no income flow whatever and has had none for at least a year. The only significant ““asset”” is the building off Kensington High Street, built in the late 1950s as a fresh home when Her Majesty’s Government took over its old home in Kensington Gore. An additional burden was added to the task of maintaining that building when it was granted Grade II star listed status in 1988. That happened during my reign—if that is not the wrong word—at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. So far as I can discover it happened without my knowledge or consent, but it certainly happened during my watch and I accept responsibility for it. I gave the late Lord Braine a false premise for why we had gone along with what we discovered had happened. I wrote in a letter to him in 1989:"““The implications may be advantageous to the institute in that . . . it may be eligible for additional grant assistance for maintenance and repairs””." I could not have been more wrong. The subsequent history has totally shattered that illusion. In 2002, with the best of intentions, my noble friend Lord Blaker and the Leader of the House took part in a debate on the Commonwealth Act which fulfilled a joint aspiration—as it seems—on the part of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to shed responsibility for the institute, and on the part of the institute to achieve a kind of total independence. For whatever reason the ““dowry”” that the Foreign Office conferred upon the institute fell far short of the cost of fulfilling the statutory obligation to restore and maintain the building. Within the past 18 months, with everyone’s general consent, application was made to the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport for the building to be delisted so as to free itself of that burden. I urge the Government to give full support to that prospect, because it seems to me to be the only way out of the present situation in which the institute is bereft of resources to fulfil its purpose. The outcome of a series of public Acts of this Parliament was that the trustees could not pursue a remedy by means of a Private Bill, which would be far too complicated. However, the matter is urgent. Indeed, it is urgent enough for a solution to be sought before the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Valletta next week. Unless we seek an answer along those lines any value that may be left in the site and the building will redound to the benefit—who knows when?—of some unknown property developer, and certainly not to the benefit of the youth of the Commonwealth, which is its objective. Members of the Government are well aware of the issues that I raise. They are under discussion. Indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, has given personal attention to them. However, I urge the Government with as much energy and vigour as I can command to find a solution that really will resolve this and which will crack the problem rather than postponing it along the lines of the rather imperfect decisions that have been taken so far.