(l-r) Westminster Abbey order of service, Commonwealth Peace Prize award at Marlborough House and King Charles (Royal Family on X) introduces his playlist.
A day of hymns, ceremonies and a gathering of nations with a long-standing association felt like an oasis on 10 March 2025. Around Commonwealth Day 2025, world leaders quarrelled publicly in front of live cameras and neighbour countries attacked one another while talking of possible peace agreements. And a couple of Commonwealth member states, Canada and South Africa, had already come under fire from the United States’ returning President Donald Trump.
‘As we mark this Commonwealth Day together,’ King Charles III said in his 2025 Commonwealth Day message, ‘there is no more important task than to restore the disrupted harmony of our entire planet.’
The message was one of many changes in protocol which marked this Commonwealth Day. Issued on the morning of 10 March, it was not read out by the King as part of the Commonwealth Day Service of Celebration at Westminster Abbey. This year, the annual service was delivered in a stripped-down format with even the monarch’s annual message issued separately, no longer part of the service line-up.
Media releases indicated close coordination between the Abbey and Palace with the King scheduled to present the baton for the 2026 Commonwealth Games to designated athletes at Buckingham Palace immediately after the Abbey service.
Resilience
The environmental message was also clear throughout Commonwealth Day proceedings. The Commonwealth Games Federation (CGF) announced what they called ‘a reimagined relay for a new era’. For the first time, the CGF said that each of the 74 participating Commonwealth Games nations and territories would be given their own baton to decorate, showcasing their own culture with ‘no formal Baton handovers or costly or polluting travel and transit between nations and territories’.
The environmental message was clear – even the Games baton was not allowed to rack up airmiles.
The 2025 theme ‘Together we thrive’ had been pitched by the Commonwealth Secretariat as a celebration of ‘the enduring spirit of the Commonwealth Family – 56 independent member countries united by shared values enshrined in the Commonwealth Charter’. Outgoing Commonwealth Secretary-General Patricia Scotland spoke of her nine-year tenure in her message, proclaiming the organisation ‘a beacon of unity and purpose.’
One of the key messages remained climate leadership. At the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in October 2024, the small island and climate resilience focus had been maintained with Samoa, the current chair, handing over to Antigua & Barbuda to host the 2026 leaders’ summit.
At the Westminster Abbey service, Maltese poet Leanne Ellul read a poem called ‘A Résumé of Bees’, written for the service, in which she observed that ‘another tree is mourning another day’ but that ‘We come in multitudes, led by one. We are the colonies of resilience’.
The recently-appointed first Commonwealth theologian in residence at Westminster Abbey, the Reverend Dr Ishaya Anthony from Nigeria, said in his reflection that the 2025 theme of ‘Together We Thrive’ had been ‘built on a deep recognition and respect of the dignity of persons. To thrive together is to embody and express a life-affirming presence that exposes, denounces, and resists any form of injustice and dehumanising relationships in our encounters in the Commonwealth and beyond’.
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Protests and the peace message
Outside the Abbey, a number of protests took place highlighting issues from Cameroon to LGBT rights across the Commonwealth. The largest contingency belonged to republican campaigners who had brought along their own large model dinosaur.
Within diplomatic circles, symbolic comments were also being made. Canada, facing the threat by President Trump to make it the 51st American state, has been mounting a pushback on trade tariffs and independence. On social media, the Canadian High Commissioner to London, Ralph Goodale, found solace in the red outfits worn at the Abbey by the Princess of Wales and the UK’s deputy prime minister as symbols of support for Canada, where the King remains head of state. ‘In diplomacy, symbols are important,’ he tweeted.
Back inside the Abbey, a peaceful feeling was stoked by a series of soulful performances, including the heartfelt rendering of her 1976 hit ‘Love and Affection’ by St Kitts-born British singer Joan Armatrading, the lilting performance by Samoan soprano Aivale Cole and the delivery of the spiritual ‘Deep River’ by Braimah and Jeneba Kanneh-Mason, which moved some in the Abbey to near tears.
The peace message had been issued a week before Commonwealth Day as the Secretariat announced the winners of the first Commonwealth Peace Prize. In one of the Secretariat’s partnership deals, the Khalili Foundation had provided a £50,000 prize for the joint winners Rev Dr James Movel Wuye and Imam Dr Muhammad Nurayn Ashafa, the religious leaders who founded the Interfaith Mediation Centre in Nigeria to promote peace and mutual understanding between Christians and Muslims. They will also serve as Commonwealth advisors on peacebuilding and conflict resolution. The award took place at the Commonwealth Day evening reception at Marlborough House, the Commonwealth Secretariat headquarters.
Speaking at the reception, Commonwealth Chair-in-Office, Samoan Prime Minister Fiamē Naomi Mataʻafa talked about the Commonwealth Faith Festival, also a partnership with the Khalili Foundation, to bring young people on board to dialogue and peace-building methods. She described the initiatives as aiming to ‘highlight the Commonwealth’s core values’.
New horizons
Outgoing Commonwealth Secretary-General Patricia Scotland thanked representatives of Commonwealth associations and other invitees in what can be expected to be a series of goodbyes as she hands over the post to former Ghanaian Foreign Affairs Minister Shirley Ayorkor Botchwey.
Away from the earnest nature of the 2025 theme, there was much to enjoy. Another new feature of this Commonwealth Day was the King’s playlist. Entitled ‘The King’s Music Room’, it was released on Commonwealth Day and introduced in a trail video by the King himself, explaining what the tracks mean to him. The playlist stream is an eclectic list of music showcasing the cultural talent across the Commonwealth from Bob Marley and Kylie Minogue to Miriam Makeba, Anoushka Shankar and Dame Kiri Te Kanawa. If you googled ‘Commonwealth’ on 10 March 2025, the King’s playlist had grabbed global attention, even as trade and other wars continued to dominate the global headlines.
King Charles’s message on the day touched on the need for peace as he made mention of the challenging global times. He pointed to how the Commonwealth’s ‘ability to bring together people from all over the world has stood the test of time and remains as ever-important today’. He wrote: ‘In these uncertain times, where it is all too easy that our differences are problems instead of a source of strength and an opportunity for learning, the Commonwealth’s remarkable collection of nations and peoples come together in the spirit of support and, crucially, friendship.’
Debbie Ransome is the web editor for the Commonwealth Round Table. She was a member of the BBC World Service Commonwealth Day commentary team at Westminster Abbey on 10 March.
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