The Commonwealth once gave Britain a much-needed sense of direction – not anymore

Commonwealth Day takes place at a time of exceptional turmoil for the organisation. In recent months, the governments of Australia, New Zealand and Britain have announced that they are either suspending or cutting their voluntary contributions to the development arm of the Commonwealth Secretariat in protest at what they regard as failures of management and leadership. The main target of their displeasure is the Dominican-born Commonwealth secretary-general, Patricia Scotland.

Canada already ceased voluntary contributions in 2013 as a mark of its concern at the decision to allow the discredited government of Sri Lanka to host that year’s heads of government summit. Baroness Scotland’s supporters are representing the latest crisis as the rich white Commonwealth withdrawing funds destined for members from the developing world, and as a personal campaign against the first black woman to serve as the organization’s chief executive.

Yet so long as the UK, Australia and New Zealand continue to make up around 65 per cent of the Secretariat’s mandatory budget contributions, their confidence in the way it is led matters. And this has never been lower.

It might be tempting for supporters of the Commonwealth to imagine that if – as Boris Johnson clearly hopes – Scotland is denied a second term in office, its fortunes will revive. But government papers recently released to the National Archives suggest that the malaise is not a temporary phenomenon.

The administration of John Major in the 1990s has often been seen as a brief period when the UK engaged positively with the Commonwealth. With South Africa no longer dominating the agenda, Major’s team helped to mould it into a “values-based” organisation, promoting democracy, the rule of law and human rights. Yet recently declassified official files paint a rather different picture. No 10 certainly felt relief at the transition to majority rule in South Africa. It allowed the UK to regain the initiative and turn the tables on those Commonwealth states that had cast it as a friend of the apartheid regime. In January 1991, his foreign policy advisor, Charles Powell, told Major that most Commonwealth members were “terrified of letting go of the security blanket which opposition to South Africa constitutes for them” fearing that without it “attention will turn to their own unsatisfactory practices, whether over human rights, duff economic policies or incompetent government generally.”

Yet if the idea of repurposing the Commonwealth for the brave new post-communist world gave British policy some sense of direction, profound dissatisfaction at the way in which it operated continued. In 1993, Major told the New Zealand prime minister that he felt Commonwealth heads of government summits were too frequent and lasted too long. He suggested holding them every four years instead of every two. His complaints about the frequency and length of summits were echoed by some other leaders including Australia’s prime minister, Paul Keating.

Their feeling was that there was simply not enough substantive business to justify the investment of time involved, and there was little sense of how Commonwealth discussions might be structured to serve constructive ends. Indeed, ahead of the summit in Auckland, New Zealand in November 1995, Downing Street’s main preoccupation was that Major would miss appearing at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday – a telling sign of the shifting political priorities of British premiers.

In the event, the execution of the activist Ken Saro-Wiwa by the Nigerian government while Commonwealth leaders were meeting in Auckland spurred them into action. The Commonwealth established a Ministerial Action Group, supposedly to monitor and enforce adherence to its core values. Yet as the controversy over the 2013 summit in Sri Lanka demonstrated, the body has lacked both the will and the teeth to do its job properly. Indeed, this year’s Commonwealth summit takes place in Rwanda, a country with a far from exemplary record on human rights and freedom of expression.

The crisis of confidence in the Commonwealth has contributed to a steep decline in its funding. Over the space of just five years, the Secretariat’s overall budget dropped from around £51m in 2012-13 to £33m in 2017-18. There has been a self-fulfilling downward spiral as the organisation struggles to prove its worth with ever fewer resources. And short-term financial hits, which a more robust body could easily shrug off, have taken on the character of major crises.

One of the few sources of unqualified support from for the Commonwealth is the Palace. The fact that the Queen has specifically asked Harry and Meghan to attend the Commonwealth Day service in Westminster Abbey is a mark of the importance that the royal family still places in the organization. This, in turn, forces British prime ministers to take it more seriously than they might otherwise do. The fact that Johnson will be joining the Windsors in the Abbey today is a sign of that.

Brexit, of course, means that the British government needs to think more seriously about its extra-European relationships. But it is far from clear that the Commonwealth is really an asset in this respect. Indeed, it arguably serves as a reminder of Britain’s imperial past at a time when increasing attention is being paid to the malign legacies of Empire. In short, the decline in the Commonwealth’s fortunes is about far more than the leadership of Patricia Scotland; and it may be impossible to reverse.

Philip Murphy is director of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies