---

The United Kingdom and the Commonwealth

The climate change conference took place just before the UN Bali conference on climate change at which its findings were presented, but I invite the hon. Gentleman to come with the Commonwealth War Graves Commission to talk to the CPA UK branch about climate change and other issues that it may wish to raise and with which it thinks that we should be involved. We should be willing and happy to meet. The hon. Member for Mid-Norfolk—with his tongue in his cheek, I hope—said that in the past the UK branch of the CPA had a reputation for surf and sun. I assure him that that has changed; we are no longer an exchange club for Members of Parliament, but a serious player in Commonwealth policy and politics. I should pay tribute to Mr. Speaker and the Lord Speaker for agreeing that from April—the week after next—the House of Commons Commission and its Lords equivalent, rather than the Treasury, will fund the activities of the CPA UK branch. That is an important step forward in making our parliamentary body independent of the Executive, and it will enable us to deliver more for Members of both Houses of Parliament. The UK CPA branch has taken a step forward in participating in an organisation called the Westminster Consortium, which brings together a range of bodies that provide advice, assistance, training and resources to Parliaments in Commonwealth countries, to help strengthen their capacity to hold their Executives to account. The other bodies include the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, which I also chair, the National Audit Office, the Clerks Department's overseas office, and others. Together those organisations have made a bid for money from DFID's global transparency fund to do work to strengthen the capacity of Parliaments abroad. The consortium has parliamentary functioning work in hand at the request of the Parliaments of Guyana, Uganda and Kenya. The Kenyan Deputy Speaker came across a couple of weeks ago, and the Kenyan Speaker will come to the UK next month to discuss what we can do to help the Parliament of Kenya deal with the problems that arose following the country's elections. It seems clear that the fundamental problem in Kenya was that the elections were not run by an independent electoral commission. A day or two after the president of the electoral commission of Kenya had announced that President Kibaki had won the election, he said that he had done so under duress. That is hardly surprising, as a year or so before, the President had packed the commission with a partisan team of his own supporters. If the next Kenyan elections are to have credibility among the Kenyan citizenry and the international community, they will have to be run by an independent electoral commission. The law on the commission needs to change and the people with the responsibility to make law in Kenya, are, of course, those in its Parliament. It is a hung Parliament; no party has an overall majority and its members represent a wide range of different parties and different points of view. It is important that they should exercise their authority over the Executive and ensure that a newly formed electoral commission of Kenya has representation from the whole spectrum of political parties and, I would advise, from Kenyan civil society too—although that is their decision, of course, not mine. In some developing countries, Parliaments are intimidated by powerful Presidents, and if we in the Commonwealth genuinely subscribe to the democratic principles that underlie our membership, it is important that we work with colleagues to ensure that Parliaments have the strength, capacity and confidence to challenge the Executives in their countries and hold them to account. Many other Members want to speak and I have probably spoken for too long, but I should like to mention one other piece of work, in Sierra Leone. It was commissioned by DFID and implemented by the Westminster Foundation for Democracy. A few years ago, Sierra Leone was a country destroyed by conflict and violence. The United Kingdom—including, of course, its armed forces—played an important role in bringing that conflict to an end and developing the capacity of the civilian Government. Before the elections in Sierra Leone last year, the Westminster Foundation for Democracy was asked by DFID to work with each of the political parties in the country to help them present their cases to the electorate in policy, rather than ethnic or tribal, terms. To begin with, we worked with all the parties; towards the end we spent more time working for the four largest parties. We helped them to use techniques common in this country. Pledge cards were produced so that politicians could explain in an emblematic, totemic form to their electorate what they would seek to do if elected. We persuaded the Sierra Leone Broadcasting Service to run an ““Any Questions?”” programme. In Africa, it is quite a unique idea that members of the public should be able to question members of or candidates for Parliament about what their policies would be and what they had done in the past. It was a tremendous success. The training was done on a cross-party basis; trainers came from the Conservative, Liberal Democrat and Labour parties. We asked each opposition party to consider what it would do in its first few weeks of government if it was elected. Then we asked President Kabbah's ruling party what it would do if it was not elected and became the opposition party. What would its role be as the leading opposition party? In the elections, something happened which is unusual in Africa: there was a revolving door—the ruling party was voted out and another party was voted in. The country had been involved in the bloodiest conflict just a few years ago, but it did not go back to that. The door revolved—a new party went in and the old party came out and took up its role as an opposition. That shows the genuine things that can be done by parliamentary capacity building, and that is immensely easier to do in a Commonwealth country. I said that I would sit down, and I will. The final thing that I want to say is this. Don McKinnon provided outstanding leadership as the secretary-general of the Commonwealth in the past eight years. I offer him my best wishes for whatever he does from now on and give my congratulations to Kamalesh Sharma, the new secretary-general. I wish him good luck in keeping the Commonwealth in good shape in the years ahead.