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Commonwealth

My Lords, I join others in welcoming the noble Baroness, Lady Vadera, to this House and to her ministerial job. We worked closely together in preparing the G8 summit at Gleneagles, particularly on poverty reduction in Africa and on development issues more generally, to which I know she is deeply committed. I welcome her to this House. In my last appearance before the Foreign Affairs Committee in another place, before I left the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, I was rightly taken to task for agreeing an annual report of the FCO that made no mention of the Commonwealth. I pleaded guilty with genuine contrition, because I share others’ views that the Commonwealth has a crucial role to play and that its role is frequently and usually underestimated. I want to make three short points, one political and two developmental. The political point echoes the point of the noble Baroness, Lady Tonge, about the role of the Commonwealth Ministerial Action Group, CMAG. I was very struck, upon attending the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Brisbane in 2002, by the number of Commonwealth countries, often small and isolated, which showed huge appreciation of the peer group pressure put on them for good governance by the Commonwealth Secretary-General and by CMAG. Britain is a member of CMAG, and I share the hope of the noble Baroness, Lady Tonge, that the Government, both in the run-up to and after the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Uganda, will give real impetus to CMAG’s work. The first of my two development points is as follows. Last week I was in South Africa and Zambia, two Commonwealth countries in which the positive effects of good governance, effective economic management and economic growth are clear to see. I would welcome the views of the Minister and of DfID on the importance they attach, as I do, to economic growth as a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for poverty reduction in the third world, and to the need for Government, business and civil society to work together to meet the millennium development goals. In that context I should declare an interest as chairman of the trustees of Merlin, the NGO that provides essential medical help to many of the poorest people in the world, including in Commonwealth countries. My third and last point is on Zimbabwe. The contrast between South Africa and Zambia, which I saw last week, and the situation in Zimbabwe could not be more striking. Others have spoken about the politics of Zimbabwe. I hope that DfID will, albeit discreetly, be making the necessary preparations to work with others, particularly Commonwealth neighbours of Zimbabwe and the Commonwealth Secretariat, to ensure that, when the Mugabe regime finally ends, that country can realise its economic potential and we can end the wholly unjustified and unnecessary misery of its people.