Commonwealth: Democracy and Development

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Sheikh, who has made one of his very professional speeches. Underneath, he is a real trader. He speaks most of the Indian languages as well as Swahili. While he may appear to be rather a serious man, he suffers from the disadvantage that he has to share an office with me, and I am never sure when I am serious or not. I have spent most of my life in trade. When people asked what I did, certain parts of my family would whisper, "He’s in trade", as if it was not the thing to be. My first assignment when I joined your Lordships’ House—surprisingly enough, as a failed economist who indeed had failed at everything—was to be appointed to a team to advise the Government of India on their future trading. I had only just joined the Lords, 45 years ago or longer. I went out as a young man with two introductions, one from the Speaker of the House of Commons and one from the secretary of the MCC. The letter from the secretary of the MCC opened every door until I was asked if I would like to play a game of cricket against the Indian XI. We dealt with ilmenite, manganese, coir, jute, copper, handicrafts in Kashmir, prawns down in the south and cashew nuts. But I never believed, when we made certain predictions, that India would outstrip them by 10 times, manufacture things and then buy back British Leyland. We all liked the old former Morris Oxford in India, which, as one of my colleagues pointed out bluntly, could take ruts and bumps. From India I found that I had moved on to Africa—to Sudan, which could have been the breadbasket of the Middle East. Everywhere I went, one thing I learnt later in my mind was that I like the phrase, "o’er land and o’er sea". In the debate on the Queen’s Speech I made certain suggestions. I have learnt in your Lordships’ House that if you want to get anything done at all it takes 10 to 15 years, like some good wines. So I have used what I call the "rule of thumb". It is extremely useful. If you want to know where you are when you are sailing with a rather bad map, you put your thumb on the coastline and stay outside the width of your thumb. If you want to know where and how deep to plant things on land, wherever it may be, you stick your thumb in the ground. If you want to know how far away you are from other people—for example, from the noble Lord, Lord Luce, although I am not allowed to gesture in your Lordships’ House—you hold up your thumb and shut one eye, and you will see that it will move to the right. You work out how many fingers that is, and that will tell you how far offshore you are. The theme I want to adopt today is to state further that when you look at the Commonwealth, you should first of all look at it from space. As Secretary of the Parliamentary Space Committee, I can say that you can do this with three or four pictures—it is fantastic. Now to the land of the Commonwealth, which is very significant, with its 54 countries. I have said to myself, "Yes, you have the countries of the Commonwealth, and within that there are 15 Her Majesty’s Realms"—maybe one day Wales and Scotland, if they go independent, will become Her Majesty’s Realms—"but you also have 12 or so overseas territories. If you then look at those territories and the islands that are with them, you find that you probably have over 100 pieces of real estate that have sea around them". So, in the defence and foreign affairs debate, I said that we should immediately introduce a Bill in this House to extend the coastal limit of our territories, Her Majesty’s Realms and the Commonwealth to 500 miles. This is not too difficult. Surprisingly enough, the United Kingdom is 14th in the top countries with more than 10,000 kilometres of coastline in the world, ahead of India. If you consider all this along with the resources of the sea, and then you look at global warming, defence and everything you can think of, the sea becomes important. One of the suggestions that I have made—apart from doing what I have just said and claiming the rights to it—is that we should launch a series of satellites that could survey the sea, and name them after Commonwealth leaders. That is in hand, I suggest to the Ministry of Defence, and I would like to buy them if someone would finance them. The key element of all, though, is people. Having been brought up partly in Canada and having more cousins in Australia—who have just written my family history—than I have had hot dinners in my life, and thinking of the areas that I have worked in, I am interested in people. The people of the Commonwealth are important to us. Are they British citizens? No; those from the overseas territories, under the British Overseas Territories Act 2002, are citizens, but the territories under us presumably become part of the Commonwealth. Could we not think of harmonising the Commonwealth and bringing it together by having at airports not just entry signs that say "EU" and "Swiss" but one that says "Commonwealth"? Is there not some added value that we could give to the Commonwealth nationality, as such? Where is a Commonwealth citizen domiciled? How many Commonwealth citizens are there in the United Kingdom who may suddenly be forced to be non-doms? The value of the Commonwealth is not what it is today but its potential. It is the only global organisation in the world, and one of which I have become extremely fond.