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Commonwealth

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Earl, Lord Sandwich, whose very name has been imprinted on my mind as an island archipelago since an early childhood atlas. It is highly imaginative and timeous of my noble friend Lord Freeman to have secured this debate in advance of that unlyrically christened instrument, CHOGM; although the word ““chogm”” in Malta has the pulse of a powerful marine engine that we must hope will metaphorically eventuate there. In that context, I endorse with enthusiasm my noble friend’s thesis that CHOGM should concert a common position in advance of the WTOT ““tradefest”” in Hong Kong, just as I applaud his anatomisation of the Commonwealth at large. Others in your Lordships’ House have joined my noble friend in wishing to see us use the Commonwealth’s collective history and political geography as a force for practical good in an uncertain world. In the midst of such uncertainty, the stability and familiarity of the Commonwealth and the Commonwealth relationship—I allude to relations between other Commonwealth countries, apart from ourselves—is not only a reassurance but a sure basis for further exploration. My own positiveness is rooted in a gap half year after a postgraduate degree at Harvard, whence I returned to London by what are now 16 independent members of the Commonwealth in north America, Australasia, Africa and the oceans. The prime motivation in 1959 was to see those countries before we joined the EEC, whenever that might have been. But that motivation had been stimulated at Oxford through being a rareish British member of the Ralegh club, which for the benefit of the Hansard reporter, is spelt R, A, L, E, G, H. This consisted mainly of Commonwealth Rhodes scholars and met under Chatham House rules on Sunday nights to hear great men speak about the Commonwealth. I recall evenings with Alan Lennox-Boyd, then Colonial Secretary, K M Pannikar and J K Galbraith, whose own origins were Canadian, before he became the American Ambassador in India. One of the countries I visited, in the days before Tanganyika and Zanzibar were united, was Tanzania. Last year, I went back with a CPA delegation and I was struck by how the personal relations within the political classes of both countries remain so close and vibrant between us. The index of heads of state in Commonwealth countries, educated in the United Kingdom, took another turn when the Tanzanian Prime Minister reminded our CPA delegation colleague, Mrs Valerie Davey, then Labour MP for Bristol West, that in the mid-1960s she had taught him in Tanzania—rather than in the UK. In 1959, in Tanganyika, I visited Bagomoyo on the coast, the town through which some 19th century British explorers of Africa set out on their journeys and through which the body of Livingstone was carried back to the sea. We did not go there last year, but I remember the archaeological investigations occurring there 45 years earlier into Arab buildings, and that prompts my contribution today. Other Members of your Lordship’s House are picking up the threads of my noble friend Lord Freeman in exploring how the Commonwealth can exploit our mutual past in today’s circumstances for political ends. I want to ventilate how we might strengthen and renew the links in cultural ways to reinforce the possibility of political opportunities. I am thinking, in particular, of collaboration to enhance our mutual heritage in the built environment. Of course, there may be exports, like the stone from the quarries of Portland which provide the headstones for all the Commonwealth war graves in the world or the wrought iron which went out as ballast in returning Australian wool clipper ships to make Melbourne, with New Orleans, one of the greatest cities in the world for wrought iron architecture. But I am thinking more of technical services and marketing expertise—only, of course, if they are welcomed—in restoring the Commonwealth’s built environment, whether imperial or otherwise, where these are the keys to tourist success, as India has already proved. Last night, at the Heritage Counts dinner, I sat next to a senior English Heritage officer who has himself taken 5,000 photographs of colonial architecture. The catalogues of British book auction houses are likewise full of photographs of the imperial past. My own great-grand-uncle who, like a good sapper officer, painted watercolours in the Crimea, was one of the earliest photographers in Mauritius where, in his sapper capacity, he was building the roads, the port, the magistrates court and the prison. If we can build a Commonwealth facility, possibly through a charitable vehicle under Commonwealth auspices, to display and to enhance our mutual heritage, we shall not only do economic good, but also increase the knowledge we have of each other and the reasons why the Commonwealth, in the familiar words of 1066 and All That, is a good thing. In advancing this cultural salient, I take comfort from cricket, which others have mentioned. This country’s particularly salient contributions to global civilisation have lain in political common sense and lyric poetry, which come together in the game of cricket, itself one of the few international sports to have laws rather than rules. It has been one of the binding threads of the Commonwealth, appealing remarkably to a diverse series of national temperaments. But above all, we must capitalise on the Commonwealth’s capacity for good humour and good-natured debate. At a Commonwealth education ministers’ conference in Nicosia in the early 1980s, I once had to defend the British policy of charging full costs for overseas student fees, even if those full costs in an admirably ambiguous British way, were never precisely defined. In intensity of assault, the occasion was a rerun of the action at the mission station at Rorke’s Drift, but I shall never forget how good humour made it an enjoyable and not merely a memorable event for myself, in which all of us remained friends.