Exports: Africa and the Commonwealth

Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts

Monday 27th November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Popat for promoting this debate and for his excellent opening speech. I look forward to the maiden speech of my noble friend Lady Fairhead. She will not only be making her maiden speech but speaking for the Government, and no doubt will tell us all the things the Government will be doing in this area—which is quite a lot.

It is a lot more than in the past because, as my noble friend Lord Popat, has reminded us, next spring, in the middle of April, Her Majesty’s Government will be holding an enormous conference of the 52 nations of the Commonwealth—there may be more by then—and arranging a gathering, to which the Queen will give her welcome at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle, on a scale that has not been replicated for many years. There has been a vast change in the emphasis and interest of Whitehall, the Government and policy-making circles about the Commonwealth recently. To give a statistic: the Foreign and Commonwealth Office used to have a brave unit of about six to seven people looking after the Commonwealth, struggling over the years and not getting much interest, and now there are more than 60 officials working in the Cabinet Office and a special unit directly under the Prime Minister, in preparation not only for the summit but for a vast expansion of bilateral links with the Commonwealth network throughout the world.

This has all taken a long time. Twenty-two years ago some of us put forward a report in the House of Commons saying that the Commonwealth was going to be the new thing; that the general view that it was of the past was wrong; that it was full of potential; that the great new markets of the world would link up with the Commonwealth; and that we should put it at forefront of our thinking. No one took the slightest notice in those days—it fell on completely fallow ground—and the media were deeply uninterested. The late 1990s was a low point in interest in the Commonwealth.

Why has it changed, as it has, in the past year or two? Obviously the Brexit story has wakened a lot of minds to the potential of the Commonwealth and the realisation that it is where the great new markets will lie. Also, the simple fact is that trade with the Commonwealth over the past 20 or 30 years, particularly with Africa, has been rather small. It was falling from the much higher levels of the post-war years to very low levels—and small trade means small interest. The statistics are rather minimal: 9% or 10% of our total trade was with the Commonwealth, and considerably less with Africa.

My message this evening is simply: do not look at the trade statistics, look at the trends. The trends are moving very fast indeed and unless we keep up with them, we will find ourselves badly wrong-footed. The trends point strongly all the way to the Government’s correctness in being more interested by the day in the Commonwealth network and in seeing the Commonwealth as part of our UK policy in the future rather than as a sideshow.

Why? There are six reasons. First, the Commonwealth turns out to be, in this age of connectivity, a gigantic transmission engine of our soft power—which is considerable, which we have not applied nearly effectively enough and which we can now deploy much more effectively.

Secondly, there is the Commonwealth network—and it is a network. It is not a matter of bilateral links between Britain and 52 countries but a network between 52 countries, which adds up to about 1,376 different network connections. It is a gateway to the new markets of Asia and Africa and to the supply chains that have now developed in the digital age. These are completely different from the trade patterns of even 20 years ago. They wind through Africa, Latin America and Asia; we are a part of them and Africa is increasingly becoming a part.

Thirdly, the trend is towards services. We live in a gigantic service economy. Knowledge and data transmission products dominate world trade, earning, according to McKinsey, more resources and returns than physical trade by containers, railways and so on. There is a huge change there. What is the best transmission mechanism for services? The English language is a wonderful incentive and a fertile ground for expansion of services, and that is what we will see not only in Africa but in other parts of the Commonwealth as well. That is where our service trade will prosper most.

Fourthly, there is its connectivity. Contrary to the mythology of Africa—that it is backward, moving slowly and so on—it is alive with developments in mobile technology. Kenya is one of the most advanced countries in the world in that, as is South Africa. The mobile telephone, the iPad and the world wide web have brought about a total transformation of the African economies. Our supplies of equipment, knowledge, communication and technology are very important and growing more so in that area. We will do increasingly well the more we concentrate on it.

Fifthly, there is the China factor. This does not much feature in a lot of the briefing I have seen for this debate, but everyone is interested in trade with China. China is deeply involved in almost every economy in Africa and we have to work alongside China and, in many cases, have a triangular relationship with it when developing joint projects in a way that we would never have dreamed of doing in the past. This is the new pattern of the future. China and to some extent India are both deeply involved in Africa, so we have to be involved with China and India to be effectively involved in Africa.

Sixthly, the simple fact is that Africa is expanding. It is heading for a population of 400 million people by 2025 or 2030, so it is a colossal new market and one in which we would be very foolish to be running behind; we have to run ahead. We have this marvellous instrument of the Commonwealth network, which, although neglected for years, we can now pick up and use to connect with the 19 African countries that are members of the Commonwealth and, of course, their neighbours, two or three of which are looking over the wall into Rwanda and other successful economies and saying, “Why can we not join the club as well?”.

I shall say a final word in my eight minutes on the scene in Zimbabwe. It is a gigantic country that is miserably run down and has been misruled over the years. Nevertheless, the nation has maintained real educational excellence. How the Zimbabweans have done it amid all that deprivation I do not know, but it is an amazing achievement. The Zimbabweans are the best educated people in Africa, and that is where we can help. In due course, when things settle down, and if they go the right way with democracy developing in the country, I should like to see Zimbabwe apply to rejoin the Commonwealth, of which it was once a member. I hope that it does so when the time is ripe. In the meantime, if we really want to help—not to interfere but to help—it will be through educational support, technology, research and the soft power developments, on which we can do an enormous amount. In that way we can help this great country to return to the prosperity it deserves and which it can certainly achieve. This is a fascinating scene and it is one more area where we need to be ahead of the curve, rather than behind it. We should not look at the statistics of the past, which are miserable, but at the trends of the future, which are extremely exciting.