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Commonwealth

My Lords, as is appropriate in a debate in your Lordships’ House, we have heard a lot about past connections with what used to be called the British Empire and Commonwealth, but also a certain amount about where we are today. Clearly, the Commonwealth is now very different from what it was when we were born. I recall as a boy singing in the Coronation and watching people from the British Empire and the Commonwealth—the Queen of Tonga and all. We were in a very different world. We cannot overplay the significance of the Commonwealth today, but clearly we need always to reinvent the rationale for these networks in each generation. I think that there has been a general consensus from all Benches that we are in danger as a country of underplaying the Commonwealth’s significance. It is a very useful network in all sorts of ways—for development and for democracy building. I say that as someone who does not believe—as the current US Administration appear to—that democracy building can be done in five years. Democracy building, as we are all very clear here, is a long-term process—few European countries successfully move through the painful transition from traditional society to modern state without a lot of bloodshed and revolution—and it gives us a degree of leverage to help countries that are following us through this process go through it with as little pain as possible. The Commonwealth is a very good network for education and educational exchange. I fear that in recent years we have reached a stage at which the United Kingdom takes more from the Commonwealth in terms of teachers and students trained elsewhere and does not put enough back in. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, will approve if I say that my son spent a summer in Uganda teaching mathematics. He thoroughly enjoyed it and came back with a degree of knowledge of the politics of Uganda. He assured me that four years ago it was much less democratic than appeared to be the case. That is precisely the sort of thing that we should be doing—encouraging our young people to teach in other Commonwealth countries as well as taking some of their best-trained students, as we do in this country. Migration and dual-citizenship should be seen as a plus in this country; far too often they are seen as a minus. Migration, after all, is not simply a one-way movement. People come here, they work and they go back. A Barbadian couple with whom I used to sing in my local church choir announced two years ago that they were returning to Barbados to retire, after a good 40 years in this country. There are continuing social and economic links between us and those other countries from which we should benefit. There are military links through joint peace-keeping operations in the United Nations. There is not enough training yet, but as we begin to build a peace-keeping arrangement between the European Union and the African Union—a very new development—Britain should be able to contribute much more than many other European countries, precisely because we have those links to so many African Union armies. Of course one must mention our very strong link in that 5 per cent of British Army troops have been recruited from Commonwealth countries, most notably Fiji. We should make the best of those continuing links in Britain’s social and economic interests—above all, with India, where already it is clear that the British economy benefits from those who trade between Britain and India because they are closely rooted in both societies; with countries such as Singapore, South Africa and Malaysia; potentially, and we hope also, with Nigeria and Ghana; and, through our own Chinese community, with China. I was not quite clear whether the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, was suggesting that if we cannot have Hong Kong in the Commonwealth we should encourage China to join as a whole. As the Chinese economy becomes more important, we have assets in this country which link us to there. I want to talk about how we reinvent the Commonwealth in terms of public diplomacy and explaining to people in this country that the Commonwealth still matters and is part of a network of advantage to Britain. Our younger generation, wherever their parents or grandparents were born, know very little about the Commonwealth. I was struck watching the celebration of Remembrance Sunday last weekend by how little the Commonwealth contribution to the Second World War or the First World War is remembered. This is almost the central institution of British memory each year. It might almost be said that we wallow in it. We have forgotten that the largest army in the British Imperial Armies, after Britain, in both world wars came from the Indian subcontinent and that, as has been mentioned, regiments from East Africa, West Africa and the Caribbean also played significant parts. I saw no Indian veterans marching past the Cenotaph. I watched a small group of elderly West Indians in the final stages of the procession. As Britain holds the EU presidency on the 60th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, just behind the West Indians was a small group, unmarked, of Dutch, Danes and Norwegians, who also played a significant role in the war. Perhaps the Government will think more intelligently in future about how we play the politics of memory in this country, and how that fits into not just ceremonies but history teaching in British schools. My wife and I were at the Monte Cassino war cemetery some years ago with a young Asian couple on their honeymoon who thought that that had nothing to do with them, until we took them to show them the six pillars of names of Indian soldiers who had died in the battle for Monte Cassino. Our young people need to know about those links if they are to understand a world in which Britain is no longer a white country, and in which Britain is linked in all sorts of ways that benefit us to a global economy and society. If we want to maintain the Commonwealth network as a bridge between North and South, we and our other Commonwealth partners need to retain the legitimacy to offer advice, criticism, financial assistance and training and, sadly, in some cases, as in Sierra Leone, to participate in humanitarian interventions when conflicts spill across borders or domestic order collapses. So we must continue to invest in the Commonwealth, in symbolic as well as financial and political terms. We must explain to our rising generation why that network remains valuable to us as a country, but is also a network that reaches deeply into this country and links us in many valuable ways to states and societies across the world.