Lahore: Vibrant, changing and modern

It is 6.30 am Saturday morning in Lahore, the room service waiter points at the TV news and says “that’s you”. I agree that it is, as footage plays of a meeting I had the day before with Nawaz Sharif, PML-N political leader and twice former Prime Minister of Pakistan, and, Shabaz Sharif, his brother and the Chief Minister of Punjab.  We watch as this is followed by shots from a reception we gave for 500 people to mark the Her Majesty the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee: the Chief Minister and I stand to attention for Pakistan and UK national anthems, and then we cut a giant cake iced with representations of our two national flags and a crown.  The waiter tells me of his great respect for Shabaz Sharif, and he leaves me to reflect on what my visit to Lahore has demonstrated about the strength and nature of the relationship between the UK and Pakistan.

Not long after I arrived in Pakistan, someone told me that there was an old joke that “Islamabad is ten miles from Pakistan”. Having served previously in Washington (and as a Londoner born and bred) I know about the pitfalls of not getting out from inside “the Beltway” and assuming that life in the capital is representative of the rest of the country.  So I had spent three busy days, culminating in the Queen’s Birthday Party, meeting political leaders and parliamentarians from all the major parties:  PPP, PML-N, PTI and J-I, journalists and media, civil society leaders, including the Archbishop of Lahore, and businessmen and women, talking about our priorities for working together in Punjab and hearing from them how they saw the challenges facing the people of Pakistan and where they thought the UK could best make a difference.

So, what are the key messages I took away from Lahore?

That Punjab, with a growing population larger than that of the UK (63% of the population of Pakistan), is at the heart of much of what we are trying to achieve. The challenges of providing education and jobs for its growing population are daunting but are areas where the UK is working with the Chief Minister and Provincial government and is already making a difference.

That Lahore, with its many historic buildings and monuments and its rich cultural life, in many ways embodies the many faces of the UK-Pakistan relationship. It is historic, with Victorian architecture and institutions symbolising our shared heritage. Visiting the Lahore Museum on World Museum Day, was an opportunity to draw attention to the world class collection of Gandharan sculpture  housed in an imposing Victorian building that would not look out of place in the “Museum Mile” in South Kensington.

It is underpinned by close personal and family connections, old and new, between our two peoples. For me, this visit was an opportunity to walk in my grandfather’s footsteps as he had served in Lahore in the British Army in the 1930s. And many of the people I met shared stories about their own personal or family ties to the UK, from children or grandchildren living or studying in the UK to the Chief Minister’s remarks at the QBP recalling the UK’s support for democracy and his own period of exile in the UK after the military coup in 1999 that ousted his brother, Nawaz Sharif, the then Prime Minister.

And it is changing and vibrant and modern, rooted in the shared interests and priorities of our two peoples, in economic growth, in increased trade and investment between our two countries, and in education, working together to build a brighter future for Pakistan.