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Commonwealth Scholarship and Fellowship Scheme

The Minister and I seem to be the epilogue to this immensely powerful 60-minute drama that we have just heard. Like others, I am immensely personally happy that the noble Lord, Lord Luce, secured this very important debate. In fact, it would be an impertinence for me to try to sum up all the hugely distinguished, authoritative and learned contributions that we have just heard over the past hour or so on this situation. What is the situation? We know that the blunt statement from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office back in March was to the effect that it would be the end of FCO contributions to the Commonwealth Scholarship and Fellowship Plan and that about 100 scholars would be affected. The statement went on to explain that there would be a release of £10 million for other policy goals. I must say that when I read that those other policy goals were going to be principally on climate change, my heart sank at the sheer lack of understanding behind such a statement. Everyone knows that international scholarship, political leadership and scientific momentum are the practical gateway—practical, as the noble Lord, Lord Bew, emphasised—to a successful environmental policy and to energy security and making any progress at all towards effective fighting of global warming. That is by the way. The deeper worry that I have in all this is the one that has been articulated by several of your Lordships, which is that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office today in its collective mind does not understand the significance of the Commonwealth network, which now contains seven or eight of the leading hi-tech dynamic nations of the 21st century, or the enormous attraction of the Commonwealth to many newcomers, countries outside the Commonwealth. Today I had a delegation of Japanese senior mayors of great cities whose number one question was, ““How can we observe and get closer to the activities of the Commonwealth?””. We are looking here not at nostalgia or a past relationship but forward realistically to the network of the 21st century.