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By Root 2915 0

in Namibia, suffering under South African rule. One of the other heads of government later suggested to me that someone should ask Maurice Bishop about the number of his own people, especially his country’s professional and middle class, now held in Grenada’s prisons, put there by his Government. There was also one of those arguments, which so frequently afflicted the Commonwealth, about sporting ties with South Africa. The Springboks had played in New Zealand amid scenes of disorder and Robert Muldoon was bitterly condemned for his alleged breach of the Gleneagles Agreement, by which international sporting relations with South Africa were regulated. He put up a robust defence. At least with the Rhodesian issue now settled, Britain was less the focus of international criticism by the Commonwealth than on the previous occasion, and the serious pressure for sanctions against South Africa still lay in the future.

In my interventions during the conference, I acknowledged that conditions for the developing world were undoubtedly difficult. They had been hit hard both by the rise in the oil price and by the effects of the recession on the western markets on which they relied. However, I emphasized that wealth creation rather than international wealth redistribution still had to come first — indeed more so than ever. I also defended the British record on overseas aid, which was very good when you looked further than the narrowly defined aid programme and took into account both public and private sector loans and investment. With myself and the heads of government of six other Commonwealth countries due to attend the forthcoming international conference on ‘North-South’ issues in Cancún, I thought it would be well worth putting the facts on the record now.

While I was in Australia Ted Heath delivered a vitriolic speech in Manchester attacking my policies. Oddly, perhaps, in view of his record, Ted had become an advocate of the politics of ‘consensus’; or perhaps less oddly, since these policies seemed to come down to state intervention and corporatism. I was sent an advance copy of the speech and used my Sir Robert Menzies Lecture at Monash University to deliver a reply to him and to all the critics of my style of government. It was, unbeknown to him, President Forbes Burnham of Guyana who provided the inspiration for this in the course of the weekend retreat which the heads of government spent away from Melbourne in Canberra. In the course of this we were arguing about an issue to be reported in the final communiqué which we were drafting. At one point Forbes Burnham said that we must achieve a consensus. I asked him what he meant by ‘consensus’ — a word of which I had heard all too much — and he replied that ‘it is something you have if you cannot get agreement.’ This seemed to me an excellent definition. So in my lecture I inserted a passage which read:

To me consensus seems to be: the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects; the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead. What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner ‘I stand for consensus’?

On the return journey I took the opportunity to visit Pakistan. I flew to Islamabad to be met by President Zia. The war in Afghanistan was at its height and it was arranged that I should visit one of the refugee camps set up in Pakistan for fleeing Afghans. We flew to the Nasir Bagh Afghan refugee camp by helicopter. It was large, but impeccably clean, orderly and obviously well run. I spoke under a huge tent, sheltered from the burning sun, while the refugees — men, women and children — sat cross-legged on the ground. I told them of my admiration for their refusal to ‘live under a godless communist system which [was] trying to destroy [their] religion and [their] independence’ and promised them my help. My speech was interrupted from time to time as people rose to their feet to express the