Soft Power and the UK’s Influence (Select Committee Report)

Baroness Kidron Excerpts

Tuesday 10th March 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

Like other noble Lords I thank the noble Lord, Lord Howell, for an excellent, fascinating report. I shall confine myself to two issues: the BBC in another form, and how the current status of the arts in our education system endangers our future influence on the world stage. I have to declare my interest. As a freelance film-maker, I work from time to time at the BBC and I am involved in several arts initiatives in schools.

Despite its flaws, the BBC remains, as others have said, the most trusted disseminator of factual programming in the world. For decades, it has distributed much loved drama and films throughout the world. Who is to say whether News 24, “Pride and Prejudice”, “State of Play”, “World Business Report”, “Philomena”, one of the BBC’s 28 language services, “Billy Elliot” or “Doctor Who” is the most powerful representation of our national identity and those values that we most wish to share? All are loved and disseminated across the globe. It is an arena in which we display great flair and confidence. My concern is, like that of my noble friend Lord Birt and others, that the battle of charter renewal and the absolute certainty in some quarters that the BBC is too big for its own good could inadvertently deliver a devastating blow to what is arguably our greatest international asset. To be frank, it is not only its detractors who cause me concern. After a sustained campaign from international sources against the BBC for more than a decade, even its defenders seem to feel that seismic change is a necessity. Sometimes better is the enemy of the very best.

Three or four years ago I was in Liberia filming at a women’s radio station. It had been set up post-conflict in a community that was dealing with epidemic rates of sexual violence, and had seen thousands of boys, many as young as eight, abducted and turned into child soldiers. Health services were still unable to deliver routine vaccinations or maternity care, and schooling was scarce. In this context of violence, fear and hardship, the radio station was a beacon of hope, dispensing information, community health, public debate and education. When I asked how they had come up with the idea of a community radio station, the founder said, “From the BBC”. In the time before the conflict she had briefly been taught by a teacher who had recorded programmes from the BBC—children’s programmes, dramas, discussions and interviews in which politicians finally got held to account—and she imagined how powerful it would be to broadcast similarly into her own community, so that she could reach women and children, even those too frightened to leave their homes. She said to me that, for her, the BBC represented what it meant to be free.

And of course, that happens all over the world. A couple of years ago I was contacted by a woman from Afghanistan who, a decade earlier, had used, in a “secret school” for women, a drama that I had directed. That drama, “Oranges are Not the Only Fruit”, raised issues of sexuality, religious intolerance and gender equality. Even in the UK it had been controversial. Imagine how thrilled we were to hear of its use by Afghan women who were determined to be educated, by whatever means. Our cultural output reaches ears all over the world that may not have access to hard fact, and people for whom it is a question of citizenship.

It may be a challenge to noble Lords to imagine that “Only Fools and Horses” and “Doctor Who” play a part in the serious undertaking of global influence but, along with the impeccable credentials and reach of the World Service and other factual output, the BBC is a presence in communities that have more complex attachments and narratives than the reductive cry of the ideologies and violence that surround them. The macho violence of radicalisation absolutely knows how to tell its story—albeit a story that we do not want to hear. In our hyper-networked world, in which half the world is a self-publisher on a potential worldwide stage, the BBC is more rather than less precious.

However we choose to represent our own strategic narrative, and whatever the final charter settlement is, the distribution power of the BBC and the level of trust that it enjoys are things that we diminish, even slightly, at great cost to our values, our reputation, our profile and our relationship with people all around the globe.

I acknowledge and support the recommendations that seek to protect the World Service, and the Government’s recognition that the BBC’s independence is a key element of its credibility, but the true influence of the BBC on the world stage requires us to ensure its future far beyond the specific remit of the World Service. The very essence of the BBC, with its duty to inform, educate and entertain—independent of government, paid for by the public—makes an irreplaceable mark on the wider world, just as it did for a single visionary woman in Liberia.

While successive Governments have had had an uneasy relationship with the BBC—arguably a sign of its success—it is the coalition Government alone who have systematically degraded the place of the arts in education. I am afraid that that is my second point. The post-war settlement brought artists of all disciplines and all social classes to prominence, giving the UK a cultural dynamism that is the envy of the world. However, in recent years an unintended consequence of the Government’s determination to prioritise STEM subjects has been to devastate arts education. Nowhere have we seen this more clearly than in our schools, which since 2010 have seen a drop of 11% in the number of arts teachers and an even greater drop in the number of children taking arts subjects in schools, as successive formal measurements of success have diminished the status of the arts.

Taking the arts out of the curriculum excludes those from less privileged backgrounds from the possibility of being an artist, a digital designer, a writer, a musician or a cultural contributor—because for the less privileged, unlike their more privileged counterparts, school represents the bulk of their cultural access. Even should a young person beat the system and discover their creativity in spite of this downgrading, student fees and the probability of debt into adulthood still ensure that it will be predominantly the privileged who dare to dream of the uncertain, and in most cases financially unrewarding, life of an artist.

The Select Committee report rightly refers to the importance of diversity, and goes to some trouble to underline the role of diaspora communities in creating a strategic narrative that proudly reflects the richness of our society and models the UK’s reputation and values of inclusivity. The post-war artists across all disciplines who transformed our society made our creative industries cutting edge and world class, and boosted our economy. They made Britain great. But this process is dependent on allowing people like John Lennon, David Hockney, Alan Bennett, Jony Ive, Steve McQueen, Anish Kapoor and Tracey Emin an education in the arts.

Every previous age has understood the power of art to tell the national story, as a reflection and purveyor of values and as a communicator across the globe. In no society has art or arts education been left to the whim of the market. Our creative community celebrates difference and reflects on human similarities. Although we have recently seen cartoonists at the centre of conflict, it is far more usual for the creative community to be a source of understanding between cultures and peoples.

Never have the skills embodied by the arts been more useful to commerce, to communication and to international relations. That might mystify the technocrats, but to the rest of us it is merely common sense. As the report says,

“many of the soft power assets that make a country attractive require substantial investment”.

Indeed, the report agrees with the British Academy, which says that,

“governments need to make investments in critical areas such as the BBC, higher education and the arts, and then to hold their nerve when payoffs are not immediately visible”.

Soft power is a long game, and in the rhetoric about hard choices and what is nice to have but not essential, we must remember that if we are to have international repute, with a clear and compelling narrative about ourselves and our values, both the BBC in its full remit and the support of our arts education must be at the top of our shopping list.