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Zimbabwe

My Lords, so great is the suffering within Zimbabwe that the hardship being suffered here in Britain by people who served the Crown in southern Rhodesia before UDI and in many cases continued to serve thereafter and have been robbed of their public service pensions seems very small in comparison. But they are victims nevertheless: victims of the catastrophe which has overtaken Zimbabwe for whom the British Government have a clear responsibility; victims who, unlike many other victims of the catastrophe, the British Government really can help. I declare an interest as president of the Overseas Service Pensioners’ Association, which is doing its best to help these people, about 600 of them, including widows, who are dependent on social security and charity. After UDI the British Government reaffirmed southern Rhodesia’s status as a British colony by appointing a new governor. They then negotiated a constitution for an independent Zimbabwe which, according to the then Minister, provided full safeguards for public service pensions and their remittability. Unfortunately, it soon became clear that that assurance was not worth the paper it was written on. During the 1980s and 1990s the value of the pensions remitted by the Government of Zimbabwe to former Crown servants steadily declined. Then in February 2003 payments ceased entirely. Her Majesty’s Government did not then, as one might have expected, step in to help these former servants of the Crown. They said that although southern Rhodesia was a colony, its civil servants were not appointed by the Secretary of State but by the colonial Government. They failed to explain why it should make the slightest difference whether a person was appointed by the Secretary of State or by the colonial Government under the authority given them by the then Secretary of State, because that must have been the case it being a colony. Ministers have often claimed that because of our colonial past there is not much we as a country can do to help Mugabe’s victims, but there are some people who were part of that colonial past who the Government can help—British people who went out to a British colony as servants of the Crown and have suffered loss following the decision by Britain to hand over responsibility for their pensions to Zimbabwe. Earlier Governments also claimed that they were under no legal duty to guarantee payment of the pensions, but the point is that in those days the pensions were still being paid, now they are not. Whatever the legal position, the Government’s moral duty is plain.