My Lords, I wish to support the arguments put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, by recalling two anecdotes. He very forcefully and persuasively deployed the arguments about students from abroad, external to the European Union, coming to this country. One anecdote is about when I visited Tanzania with the late George Thomson and met Julius Nyerere. He had studied in a university in Britain and had translated Shakespeare’s plays into Swahili. The ties with Tanzania were greatly fostered by that personal encounter at a particularly difficult time when we faced apartheid in South Africa.
The second anecdote relates to a visit I paid to Hong Kong some years later when I met the director of development and housing, who had also been to a British university. When I inquired about who were the construction engineers developing various important developments in Hong Kong, virtually every single one of them was British. I think that reflects the truth of the general principle that we should encourage people from overseas to come to this country as students not only because of the money they pump into our education system, but also because of the long-standing ties that they foster when they go back to their own countries.