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Commonwealth Scholarship and Fellowship Scheme

I echo the tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Luce, for bringing this matter before us. I shall try to be helpful to the Minister because I know that he is a decent man. I hope that by the end of my remarks I will have made a suggestion that will help him forward because, even by now, he must have realised that he has drawn the short straw today. If he has not, he should look again at the list of speakers and perhaps remember the wise advice of Denis Healey that when you are in a hole, stop digging. As has been pointed out, this decision shows no sign whatever of joined-up government. When you see an alphabet soup of departments—DIUS, FCO, DfID—you wonder where the decision is coming from. One has to look only at the Statement by the Foreign Secretary on 13 March: "““As we reviewed our schemes we found a number of weaknesses. The purpose of scholarship schemes has not always been clear””””.—[Official Report, Commons, 13/3/08; col. 23WS.]" Yet on the Downing Street website now it states that the Government regard the Commonwealth scheme as good and well run. So an element of confusion is compounded by the fact that there was no consultation with external bodies, including the universities, and no meaningful impact assessment before this decision was taken. I worry sometimes about what I call ““bean counter”” foreign policy making, where these hard realists take decisions to write off whole countries and areas of policy because the real concentration now has got to be on China or whatever is top of the pops at the moment. I believe that foreign policy is part heart, guts and instinct as well as bean-counter calculations. For example, I have been wholly committed to European membership for 40 years, but I have also always thought that one of the great gifts we can take into the European adventure is the wonders of the Commonwealth connection. I wonder about the thinking that suggests that we are going to focus on picking leaders. About 30 years ago, the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Wirral and I were on a group that modestly called itself the Atlantic Association of Young Political Leaders. I sometimes think that picking political leaders is a dangerous game; perhaps you are picking the teachers of political leaders. I worry that we see this contact purely in terms of development. That is a mistake as well. It is massively to our interests that we have scholars and students from developed Commonwealth countries. I want to see young New Zealanders, Australians, Canadians, Bahamians or whatever on that list and coming into our system—not only for their benefit, but because it gives immeasurable benefit to British students to have that contact with a wide range of Commonwealth students. I hope that the Minister will think very hard about this. As has been indicated, there has been some rowing back but, looking forward, we would like to see a positive approach to the 50th anniversary of the Commonwealth scholarship programme and a long-term commitment to funding. I did say that I was going to be helpful. In the recent report of the Committee on Standards in Public Life on a survey of public attitudes, the key priority for improvement from Ministers, as identified by the public, was owning up to mistakes. So tonight the Minister has a wonderful chance to be in total empathy with public opinion by owning up to what has clearly been a very bad mistake.