BBC World Service

Baroness Browning Excerpts

Thursday 1st December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Browning (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Alton, for bringing this very important debate to the Chamber today. I begin by paying tribute to all those reporters and newsgatherers around the world who risk life and limb, and very often the safety of their own families, to deliver the news in a format which not only we can trust in this country but is trusted and respected globally.

It is not just because I am an insomniac that I am a great fan of the BBC World Service. I do not go to sleep until the business news is finished, which I think takes me up to about two o’clock in the morning, but there we are—I was always told that once you get older you need less sleep. I enjoy the World Service, but so too do the 458 million people a week who hear it in 43 different languages. We have heard the noble Lord, Lord Alton, explain the financial crisis that is threatening the World Service, and I am very concerned that certain languages are proposed to be dropped, including Chinese, Arabic and some from the Indian subcontinent. That is very concerning.

Correspondents in 75 news bureaus around the world collect this news for us. In my childhood, my late mother worked most of her working life for BBC Monitoring at Caversham Park, so as a girl I grew up knowing many of the people who translated the news from Russia during the Cold War, and I grew to have a great respect for the work they did and the standard they set in reporting news from across the globe.

The BBC also reports between nations—how important that is for those countries where freedom of speech is challenged on a daily basis. The financial situation it faces, due mainly to the frozen licence fee at the moment but also, along the lines that the noble Lord, Lord Alton, has so clearly described to the House today, to this change of making the BBC itself fund so much of the World Service from the licence fee. That idea is past its sell-by date. The Government must take this debate today and look again with fresh eyes at how the World Service, if it is to be retained, can maintain its reputation, as it must. The financial settlement for the World Service must be reconsidered. It is really quite anachronistic to say that this is just like any other programme coming out of the BBC. We have heard, and those of us who speak to people who listen to the World Service from other countries know, that it is not only respected but relied upon. It may be a national treasure to us, but it is regarded as a national treasure in many other countries as well.

The ability of Governments to deny internet access is also an issue that I want to raise. I fully understand why the BBC has plans to increase its digital output; that is very important. However, there are times when radio transmission is equally important—for example, very often in circumstances where people are either at war or in conflict, or where there is a regime in place that simply wants to deny its own people the opportunity to hear the truth. Of course, it is the truth for which the BBC World Service has such a good reputation. The Government have a role to play here. I say to my noble friend on the Front Bench that I hope that he will take this Bill—this debate, I should say, although it should be a Bill—away and see this as a sea change in the way this House regards how the future of the BBC World Service is to be managed.

I finish with a report from Reporters Without Borders. It was produced in May of this year, so it is very up to date. It showed that journalism is completely or partly blocked in 73% of the 180 countries it ranks, and the situation is ranked as “very serious” in a record 28 countries. I am 76—go on, I have said it—and I have lived through the end of the Second World War and the Cold War, when we were all taught in school what to do if the bomb was dropped, but I find the world a very dangerous place, far more so than I remember it, in terms of uncertainty, in the course of my lifetime. The world needs the BBC World Service; the Government must secure it.

Rivers and Coastal Waters: Sewage

Baroness Browning Excerpts

Monday 29th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)]

I very much agree with the comments of the noble Baroness and strongly welcome the work of Surfers Against Sewage, which has worked wonders in putting this issue at the top of the political agenda, where it belongs. On the back of that pressure, this House mobilised in a very effective way and that strengthened the hands of those in government who are keen to push the issue further. On timescale, the Government can use our direction-making powers in the drainage and sewage management plans to direct companies to take more action if needed. We will provide a further definition of what that means, and the ambition that we are working to, in early 2022—a few months’ time.

[Baroness Browning (Con)]

What has my noble friend’s department done on the need to improve infrastructure—for example, separating out foul water from surface water so that the amount of foul water that needs to be discharged is reduced? Does his department have a plan, has it been costed and is there a timetable?

[Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)]

My Lords, one of the things that the Government committed to during the passage of the then Environment Bill, now Act, was to conduct an assessment of what it would cost to eliminate storm overflows and—separately, because it is a different question—to eliminate the harm from storm overflows. We do not know yet what the cost of the former would be; estimates vary wildly from £150 million to £600 million. So we do not know what the cost will be or even where the opportunities are, but that is the purpose of the study that is being conducted and we will act on its results as a matter of urgency.

European Union (Referendum) Bill

Baroness Browning Excerpts

Friday 10th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Browning (Con)]

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lord Dobbs in championing this Bill in your Lordships’ House. In the contributions today from noble Lords, who clearly hold diverse views not only on this Bill but on the wider subject of our membership of the European Union, the common theme has been the recognition that the people of this country are in the mood for a referendum on the subject. It is worth drilling down a bit to ask why that is. My own view is that people now feel so much more strongly about the need for a referendum because, as other noble Lords have already mentioned, of their lack of confidence and trust in the body politic, for which many of us—all of us perhaps—should take some responsibility.

On the specific subject of our membership of the EU, in the quiet corners of the Conservative Party, when my name is mentioned in conjunction with the subject of the EU, I might perhaps be described as one of the “usual suspects”. I agree that that would probably be the correct terminology, but I have noticed today that the language we use when discussing Europe and people’s different views on it is not the language that one would expect to find in a debate on education, health or any other big political issue. It is very personal, very subjective and, sometimes, very unpleasant. I am one of those in the Chamber—looking around, I see other noble Lords who have had this experience—who have been subject to name-calling over the years because we have taken a certain view. For example, we have warned against our membership of the single currency and of the dangers of a central European bank, and argued that we should not readily give up our gold to buy up euros in order to prop up that currency. When these things have been discussed, they have not been discussed in a very mature way across the parties in either House.

That has influenced the way in which the public no longer have any confidence in what any of us say about promises to do with Europe. Prime Ministers of both parties have successively prayed in aid their negotiations in various treaties when they have gone to the electorate in a general election. We have come up with all sorts of politics-speak about subsidiarity and things like that, which we hoped would comfort the general public and suggest that, somehow, we were still in charge as politicians. However, the nub of this, and the reason why this referendum and this very specific promise of a referendum are so important in this Bill, is that the general public out there believe that the power that they thought they had through the ballot box—not the power we as politicians have—has gradually been eroded. We have conspired across the parties to use language to defuse and to try to subjugate the real discussion that was needed so that people could have a very clear understanding of what was being done, in successive treaties, in their name. Gradually you erode from people the opportunity to hold their elected representatives in another place to account. Increasingly, when those elected representatives then quite rightly hold the Ministers of the day to account, those Ministers have to defuse matters and cannot answer straight questions.

A classic case in point before us in the debate today is the question of our borders. It does not matter what a Minister says about our borders. No Minister here or in another place can do anything to control immigration across our borders as far as EU citizens are concerned, and yet anybody who has raised that issue in the past few years has been name-called in a way to stop that debate. In the end, the general public see through that and realise that they are the loser here. The general public cannot get answers from their democratically elected representatives, who in turn cannot get answers from Ministers. That is the end of democracy as we know it and have understood it for many years. That is why we need a renegotiation to bring some balance back into what was an agreement that we voted on in 1975. I put my hand up to being one of those who voted for us to go into a Common Market, as I understood it, but over the years the EU has changed. That is why the renegotiation is needed and the British people now want the guarantee of a referendum.

Tunisia

Baroness Browning Excerpts

Monday 17th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for that. Why does it appear suddenly to have caught certain people by surprise? The point when these things break through, into regrettable violence and protest in this case, is always a bit of a judgment. That there were forces at work that could lead to the situation is not such a surprise. I do not want to drag the rather overrated WikiLeaks into the situation, but leaks were flying around, which certain senior diplomats were observing some years ago, that the fundamental pattern of government in Tunis looked a bit unhealthy, and that the disease and infection of corruption and vast disparities between rich and poor were around and could lead to trouble. Senior diplomats saw that something was wrong some time ago, but it is always difficult to assess exactly when these things will explode.

[Baroness Browning]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a former chairman of the All-Party Group on Tunisia. I was pleased to hear what my noble friend told the House tonight about the involvement of the EU and the opportunity to oversee democratic elections. Will he assure us that, as things settle down, the British Government will use their influence both unilaterally and within the EU to ensure that as soon as possible, when it is suitable to do so, there will be a concerted effort to take trade delegations to Tunisia? With a more highly educated population, Tunisia cannot exist on tourism and dates. There are opportunities in Tunisia for much more trade, but the initiative must come from this side. I hope my noble friend will take that on board and understand that one of the many frustrations among that population relate to appropriate levels of work and the appropriate amount of trade that the country needs, with which we could help a great deal.

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

This is a positive set of observations. Having visited Tunisia on more than one occasion, I wondered how the basis of its economy could be sustained by its very successful tourism and by what I am told are its 20 million date trees. How one can count them? I do not know. How can it be done? The answer is that it has been done, but clearly diversification and development are badly needed. I suspect that deep down inside the causes of this present disturbance is the fact that they have not been developed fast enough. We and the EU, bilaterally, certainly have a role to play, as do our French friends and neighbours.