Commonwealth: Democracy and Development

My Lords, I declare an interest as a trustee of the Duke of Edinburgh’s Commonwealth conference. I warmly thank my noble friend Lord Sheikh for promoting this debate and for introducing it with such a constructive and powerful speech. I want to allow the Minister ample time to cover the apparent legislative muddle that threatens the right of many of our colleagues in your Lordships’ House to sit here. This needs to be cleared up very quickly indeed and I hope that it will be clarified. The debate has shown that the idea of the Commonwealth as a marginal international institution doing good works, uttering virtuous aspirations and blessing a host of unofficial organisations is now completely redundant. We now face—our comments have confirmed this—an entirely new international set of conditions, in which the Commonwealth should shed its past diffidence and prepare itself to take a lead in setting the global agenda. This will require the Commonwealth to raise its game all round, expand its ambitions and activities and forge new links with non-members in the wider world. It needs to demonstrate boldly its new significance in the promotion of world trade and investment and to build on the role that it has already begun to carve out in the World Trade Organisation debates that have been so bogged down. I was very glad to see that at the Trinidad and Tobago Heads of Government Meeting a week or so ago the Commonwealth made moves that seemed to go in the right direction and to reflect this outward-looking trend. It brought in outside speakers, including the President of France, the Prime Minister of Denmark and the Secretary-General of the United Nations. That was a very promising sign, although frankly it would have been right for this House and the other place to have had a little more time to discuss the proposal for Rwandan membership before we simply signed up with other members and invited Rwanda in. That matter should have come before us. Further progress in the Commonwealth depends, of course, on its leading member states. Until they wake up fully and understand the staggering potential of the new Commonwealth network as an ideal model for international collaboration in the 21st century, as the noble Lord, Lord Janvrin, rightly reminded us, the backing will simply not be there. This means persuading Commonwealth Governments to give place and recognition to the Commonwealth network in their foreign and overseas economic and development policies at a level that—for various reasons, mostly now completely outdated—they have hitherto failed to do. The one big exception is India, which almost alone, with its new flair and dynamism, has recognised the Commonwealth as, ""the ideal platform for business and trade"." Therefore, the first task is to bring home to a half-interested world a few new facts about the Commonwealth system that have clearly escaped our policy-makers and world leaders so far. First, far from being a rundown club, held together by nostalgia and decolonisation fixations, today’s Commonwealth, as your Lordships have rightly observed, now contains 13 of the world’s fastest growing economies, including the most potent emerging markets on the planet. Outside the USA and Japan, the key cutting-edge countries in information technology and e-commerce are all Commonwealth members. The new jewel in the Commonwealth crown turns out to be the old jewel, dramatically repolished and reset—booming India, the world’s largest democracy with a population set to exceed China’s. I am pleased that we have such a dynamic and wise Secretary-General of the Commonwealth in Kamalesh Sharma, who is able to preside over and carry forward these realities. This presents a picture that is far removed from the old image of the Commonwealth, which was believed to be bogged down in demands for more aid and arguments about, first, South Africa and, latterly, Zimbabwe. Many sleepy policy-makers find it simply too difficult to absorb what has really happened. The unloved ugly-duckling organisation has grown almost overnight into a true swan; or, to use a different metaphor, the Commonwealth of today and tomorrow has been described as the neglected colossus which should be neglected no longer. Secondly, it has recently been estimated that, in the new information age context, the Commonwealth’s commonalities of language, law, accounting systems, business regulations and judicial exchanges, as outlined by the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, give us a 15 per cent cost advantage over dealing with countries outside the Commonwealth. As for finance, one may think that Wall Street is full of the masters of the world, but the combined market capitalisations of Toronto, Sydney and London exceed those of New York. The assets of the financial services sectors of the Commonwealth group of nations are now larger than those of the entire European Union. Thirdly, it should be noted that recent detailed academic analysis has identified a growing "Commonwealth effect"—a perceived reduction in what is termed the psychic distance between Commonwealth member states and a consequent increased propensity for Commonwealth member states, especially the smaller developing ones, to engage in increased trade and investment activity between one another, in preference to and prior to trade and investment elsewhere in the global community. That is why flows of capital investment intra-Commonwealth—between Commonwealth countries—are gradually increasing in relation to other flows. However, the new story should not just be about bread-and-butter matters and new economic opportunities, although they are staring us in the face. The Commonwealth needs to be reassessed in terms of its real weight in securing world stability, balancing the dialogue with the United States, linking rising Asia and the West, helping to handle the prickliest of issues such as the Middle East and Iran, promoting better development links, bringing small and larger nations—poorer and richer—together on mutually respectful and truly friendly terms and bridging the faith divides that others seek to exploit and widen. In all these areas, the Commonwealth—reformed, reinforced, built on and enlarged—offers, as the former Indian Industry Minister, Mr Kamal Nath, said, an ideal platform. The tragic decline of America’s soft-power reputation and influence across the entire globe is leaving a dangerous vacuum. Into this vacuum, cautiously, subtly but steadily are moving the Chinese, as the noble Lord, Lord Luce, reminded us, with their cash, investment projects, trade deals, secured access to oil and gas supplies in an energy-hungry world, military and policing support, and technology. That is happening, especially across all of Africa. This gap ought to be filled not by the Chinese dictatorship but by the free democracies of the Commonwealth, from north, south, east and west, banded together by a commitment to freedom under the rule of law and ready to make real and common sacrifices in the interests of a peaceful and stable world and the spread of democratic governance in many different forms. The Commonwealth possesses the vital attributes for dealing with this new world that the old 20th-century institutions conspicuously lacked. It stretches across faiths, as we have been reminded by your Lordships, with half a billion Muslim members, and it stretches across all the continents, thus by its very existence nullifying the dark analysis of a clash of civilisations. It would be better still if a more confident Commonwealth now reaches out and makes friendly associations with other like-minded nations, both in Europe and Asia—even with Japan, which to some seems to be at the other end of the world but has some 11 per cent of the entire world’s GNP. With its confidence and dynamism beginning to be restored, Japan is interested in making links with the Commonwealth, especially with India and Britain together. The Commonwealth Secretariat should be encouraged to develop its external wing in a much more powerful way than has been the case and should perhaps nominate a high official to work with the Secretary-General and act as the Commonwealth’s high representative. If we could make an emboldened Commonwealth the central platform of the international future, it would become one of the most enlightened and responsible groupings on the planet, a true league of democracies, which is ready to be America’s candid friend but not its lapdog, and a serious and respected force in economics and trade, in upholding security and in peacekeeping. This is the body whose strengthening our own United Kingdom should now make its key foreign policy. That is not, I am afraid, the stance at present. In particular, the UK should consider transferring the administration of part of its overseas development effort, which at present goes through the EU, from that unsatisfactory channel to the Commonwealth system. Of course we must always remain the best possible local members of the European region, as we nearly always have been. But Europe is no longer the most prosperous region. It is our duty to build up our links, many of which were strong in the distant past, with what are becoming the most prosperous and dynamic areas of the world, with smaller as well as larger nations and with those that are struggling in addition to those that are rapidly industrialising and increasingly high-tech. This is what an enlarged Commonwealth can do for us. That is why Britain’s external relations priorities need major realignment and why I should like to christen the home of our able and experienced diplomats the Commonwealth and Foreign Office—the CFO, not the FCO. Small things make a considerable difference.