THERE was a time when summit meetings of the British Commonwealth meant tea at Buckingham Palace and gracefully informal get-togethers in mahogany-paneled London offices. No longer. Last week, when the 31 regular members of that unique order gathered for their 18th formal conference, Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, the host, had to plead with his colleagues to be polite to each other, "if only coldly so."
It was the Commonwealth's first regular meeting outside London (a special meeting was held in Lagos in 1966), and even in Singapore's muggy 85° weather, the chill was noticeable. Angry Black African members have vowed that they will pull out of the Commonwealth if Britain's Conservative government goes through with its announced plan to resume arms sales to South Africa's white-supremacist regime. In reply, Britain's Prime Minister Edward Heath rose in Singapore's harbor-front Convention Hall and declared bluntly that no member had the right "to sit in final judgment of the policies and the actions" of another. Alarmed by the collision course between the mother country and her former African colonies, Singapore's Lee warned: "If we cannot contain our present differences over the proposed arms sales, then it is unlikely that the Commonwealth, as at present constituted, can long endure."
Bible Lesson. To be sure, there is still a chance that the arms issue can somehow be solved by what Queen Elizabeth II has called "these personal contacts which mean so much." Even so, the issue is certain to leave a bitter aftertaste and could accentuate the centrifugal forces at work within the Commonwealth. The Africans are deeply embittered at what Zambia's bush-jacketed Kenneth Kaunda labeled a moral decision to "support apartheid with arms."
Heath argues that the arms sales, cut off by the Labor government in 1964, are needed to protect British shipping and counterbalance the Soviets' growing influence in the Indian Ocean. His case was bolstered somewhat when two Soviet warships sailed within sight of the conference hall on their way to the Indian Ocean. Heath points out that South Africa (which resigned, under attack, from the Commonwealth in 1961) will be getting mostly frigates that could not be used to enforce internal repression; helicopters, however, would also be included.
Tories as well as Laborites have questioned Heath's perspective on the controversy. Lord Alport, a Conservative peer who handled Commonwealth relations under Harold Macmillan, recently called Heath's apparent determination to go ahead with the arms sale not only "politically unwise" but also "militarily irrelevant." Worse, it could prove counterproductive. By antagonizing black African governments, Heath might actually hasten the expansion of Soviet influence—not only in the Indian Ocean but on the African land mass as well. But Heath seemed determined to have his way and lost few chances to argue his side of the controversy. The Bible lesson he read in St. Andrew's Cathedral from John 15 included a pointed message: "Ye are my friends if ye do whatsoever I command you."