I shall try to make my comments as brief as possible.

It seems to me that Zimbabwe challenges the ways in which the Commonwealth and the Government put principles into practice. I should like hon. Members to consider a simple and straightforward statement from the Under�Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, the hon. Member for Exeter (Mr. Bradshaw), who is responding to the debate. Answering an oral question a couple of weeks ago, he said that the Government welcomed the public reiteration by Pakistan's President Musharraf of his commitment to stick to his road map to democracy and to hold national and provincial elections by October 2002. Yet Pakistan is still suspended from the councils of the Commonwealth, while Zimbabwe is not.

Pakistan was suspended immediately under the Millbrook terms. Since then, at the Commonwealth ministerial action group on the Harare declaration in Durban, it was recommended that Pakistan remain suspended until democracy was restored there. The Millbrook terms are unambiguous: they state that once a suspended country returns to the Commonwealth it

"must reinforce the need for change ... even after two years."

Although Pakistan is making progress towards democracy, it remains suspended from the Commonwealth. In contrast, Zimbabwe - which is introducing the strikingly undemocratic Public Order and Security Bill and other legislation - has had no action taken against it by the Commonwealth. Such double standards do not reflect well on the Commonwealth.

Zimbabwe is also challenging the way in which the UK Government respond. The Department for International Development has reduced overall development aid to Zimbabwe in the past year, but the total amount is still larger than it was in 1997, when the Government came into office. The Department's most recent report states that development aid should be

"focused on systematic poverty reduction in ways that support local ownership."

It added that the Government

"has ... increased its commitment of assistance for well thought-out programmes in key sectors in reforming countries ... which in turn will improve the quality of public expenditure management as a whole, and help reduce corruption".

It is clear that the DFID principles regard improving democracy as a totem for supporting development aid, but that is not happening in Zimbabwe.

The Government's support for the land reform programme in Zimbabwe is very confused. Indeed, that programme, more than any of DFID's other programmes, puts into sharp relief the confusion of the Government's approach to Zimbabwe, democracy and development principles.

The communiqu� from the Abuja agreement last September rightly observed that

"land is the core of the crises in Zimbabwe and cannot be separated from other issues of concern to the Commonwealth, such as rule of law, respect for human rights"

and democracy. The same communiqu� also refers to the UK Government's financial involvement in land reform and welcomes the

"re-affirmation of the United Kingdom's commitment to a significant financial contribution to such a land reform programme and its undertaking to encourage other international donors to do the same".

That would be welcome if the land reform programme remotely assisted poverty reduction. It does not. The Zimbabwean Government's "fast-track" land reform programme is not fair land reform. It does not meet the Abuja agreement terms and it does not deserve bilateral aid from the Government.

A paper presented last year to the Southern African Regional Poverty Network asserts that the situation for huge numbers of farm workers in Zimbabwe

"is still unsatisfactory. They are still poor in absolute terms, and access to services such as health and education in particular is far from satisfactory".

As the hon. Member for Clydebank and Milngavie (Tony Worthington) said, the solutions in respect of Zimbabwe are not easy, but I believe that if we are to have statements of principle, whether from the Commonwealth or from the Prime Minister speaking, as he did recently, in India about the need to support democracy, we must be consistent. Neither the Commonwealth nor the United Kingdom Government are being consistent in their approach to Zimbabwe in putting principles into practice. That is bad for the people in Zimbabwe where, tragically, 500,000 people now face starvation, bad for general support for the Commonwealth and bad for the integrity of international development.