Commonwealth Parliamentary Association

Lord Chartres Excerpts

Thursday 8th September 2011 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of London]

My Lords, I, too, am very grateful to the noble Baroness for initiating this debate and am particularly glad to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Boothroyd, because I want to second some of the remarks that she has made. Like other speakers, I am convinced of the continuing value of the Commonwealth and welcome the evidence, despite the understandable note of scepticism that has been mentioned, that there has been a rediscovery and an increase in the personnel at the FCO dealing with Commonwealth matters. Like the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, I hope that this really does presage a change in attitudes.

I have really come to learn and I have already learnt a great deal, including some acronyms with which I am pretty unfamiliar, so it has been a pretty steep learning curve to listen to other, more knowledgeable speakers. However, the diocese of London, as a result of Mozambique joining the Commonwealth, initiated a partnership with our equivalent church in Mozambique. We have thus participated in trying to increase the provision of education, particularly in rural areas, opened a health centre and tried to support flood relief schemes. My point is not the help that we have given to people in one of the newer Commonwealth countries but the extraordinary impact that opening the channels of communication has had on thousands—in London, we educate 50,000 children a day in our schools—of young people in this country.

One of the most exciting projects has been the way in which Mozambican artists—we remember that the independence of Mozambique came out of the most damaging civil war—have been using the debris of violence and war to make artworks. Recently we have received a work called “Music Man”, made out of spent cartridges, spent gun parts and all the debris of the civil war. The work has been shown in school after school. I went to one large primary school in East London —not a church school—where a very long corridor was covered with poems, artworks and reflections on the experiences that lay behind “Music Man” and the way in which Mozambican artists created, out of the lethal detritus of violence, something much more hopeful.

My question echoes the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Boothroyd, as to whether there is any scope—and I speak like a fool—for a Commonwealth programme in particular to link schools, create partnerships within schools, promote mutual learning, and increase the ways in which we bring together young people who have very different experiences of life in our wired-up world. Much of what has been discussed is extremely valuable, but it is at a very high level and I doubt whether the commitment to the Commonwealth as a concept will survive so prosperously unless we devise initiatives that build a popular basis for Commonwealth consciousness among the young. So much of what we have been talking about is information that is shared with highly motivated people, but within a comparatively small compass.

I have just one more comment. We have heard several times already in this debate that the Commonwealth is a multireligious entity. I recently had experience of a Commonwealth initiative that has brought together leaders of different faiths, from Nigeria and Uganda and involving faiths in this country, to confront the question of climate change. This seems to me a positive way of advancing one of the main objectives of the Commonwealth; we build unity not so much by scrutinising and criticising one another as by standing together, confronting a common problem. That builds relations and creates new experiences that outflank old animosities.

Therefore, as someone who is hugely grateful for the existence of the Commonwealth, my question focuses upon how we can build that greater popular basis of Commonwealth consciousness among the young.