Soft Power and the UK’s Influence (Select Committee Report)
Baroness Kidron Excerpts(9 years, 8 months ago)
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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.
Voting Age (Comprehensive Reduction) Bill [HL]
Baroness Kidron Excerpts(11 years ago)
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Baroness Kidron (CB)
My Lords, as others have said, central to this debate is the question of maturity: whether a young person of 16 or 17 is mature enough to take on the mantle of independent thought and wise enough to play their part in the democratic process. I will not repeat what has already been said in the debate, but it seems that we have not categorically decided when a child becomes an adult, and therefore it is of little surprise that the interests of the young are woefully unrepresented.
The reality of the current political process is that the concerns of those who vote become the concerns of the political class. As a result, the young are suffering the worst employment rates, have a full-time wage that cannot meet the ever increasing costs of housing, utilities and transport. They have become burdened with debt for their education. We have consigned them to be poorer, to live at home for longer, and to look forward to bearing greater responsibilities for looking after the old. They endure a lack of representation that is positively deforming of their interests, so unless all of our citizens participate in the political process, the “political market” will always favour those with votes to spend. And yet we ask this under-represented group to make life-defining choices before the age at which they can vote, choices that tacitly require investment in a future over which they have no purchase. In doing so, we demand high levels of those same qualities that we doubt they own, those of maturity, commitment and wisdom. If we demand so much, perhaps we also owe them the tools to help shape the future we are asking them to invest in.
The noble Lord, Lord Tyler, referred to the positive relationship between citizenship lessons and registering to vote in Ireland, while others have also talked about citizenship. However, in September this year the statutory requirement to provide citizenship education was, I think, disapplied. The only formal entry point to the democratic process was loosened from the statutory offer in our schools. Next spring will see the introduction of individual electoral registration, legislation that disproportionately affects young people as many of them move to educational institutions and new towns and cities in search of work. Would it not be a much more equitable state of affairs if every young person left school with a full set of jabs, a national security number, a decent education, already registered to vote and—as other noble Lords have commented—confident to vote?
The habits that are formed in youth “stick”, whether they are smoking or reading, sports or debating. A voting habit in the next generation would be transforming to our democracy. We are leaving it too late to invest political power in the young, to make participation a norm, and to give them agency over their investment in the future. We are leaving it too late for them to have the right to demand a world that meets their needs adequately. Some people assert that a 16 year-old is not mature enough to vote, but the right to vote, as others have suggested, is not contingent on maturity or wisdom. If it were, many of us adults might be considered unfit. Voting well or correctly is not a consideration here.
In the Library note that has provided us with the background to this debate, I was amused by the ever changing statistics on the voting patterns for “Britain’s Got Talent” and “The X Factor” versus electoral turnout. Having a right and exercising it are not material; they are two separate issues. In my capacity as co-founder of an educational charity, which is declared on the register of interests, I have been privileged to have visited scores of schools and talked to hundreds of young people over the past decade. Scratch the surface and they display wisdom, energy and foresight in copious quantities. The arguments about introducing an unfit cadre into the electoral equation sounds suspiciously like other arguments of exclusion made at other times.
The question that should frame this debate is not about their suitability, but ours. We have allowed a crisis to develop—a lack of engagement and faith in the political process that threatens its legitimacy. We have failed to deal with many of the most intractable issues of the day and we have left for the next generation a multitude of fiscal, environmental and political debts. Lowering the voting age is not a question of our altruism. The political class needs some votes to spend on behalf of the long-term interests of the young, and for that we need to allow young people to participate in our democracy.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, this has been a high-quality debate and I thank all those who have taken part. I have to say that there is no consensus within the Government on this change. This reflects differing views in society at large and the divergent positions on the topic within and across political parties. Having said that, let me bring one of the underlying issues out into the open; let us all be a little honest: the reason why the Greens, the Liberal Democrats and the Labour Party are in favour of votes at 16 is not completely unconnected with the hope and belief that young people are more likely to vote for those sorts of party, and the position of the Conservative Party for various reasons is not entirely the same. The noble Lord, Lord Lexden, is an enthusiast for making it easier for those who live overseas to vote. That again is an important issue in terms of democratic participation. It is not completely unconnected perhaps with the belief that those people might just be a little more inclined to vote Conservative. So we need a cross-party consensus on the franchise and we need to approach this as carefully and consensually as possible.
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, for continuing to push for this change; it is very much a debate that we need to continue to have. I was rather struck by the report of the youth council saying that there was a severe lack of evidence that there is a demand for votes at 16, so it is a discussion that we need to continue.
The debate has gone rather more widely than this issue. We have discussed the decline in participation in party politics, the shift to single-issue politics and disengagement and alienation from politics. Those are issues that all of us in political parties need to be concerned about. It is a long-term shift, having started in the late 1960s with disillusionment with the then Labour Government, and it creates real problems for all of us who are involved in the trade-offs which politicians, particularly those in government, have to address.
Single-issues campaigns always want 100% of what they go for. I recall one of my Liberal Democrat colleagues, a lawyer, saying, “When you give a particular group 80% of what they wanted, they attack you that you didn’t give the other 20%”. Government is very often about compromise and about realising that you cannot spend everything on everything, and single-issue campaigning can to some extent deteriorate politics. I do not want to edge over in the Transparency of Lobbying Bill beyond saying that I have a particularly painful awareness this morning of the new political technologies and the extent to which singe-issue campaigning can go into that area, because the Electoral Reform Society successfully crashed my computer last night in an attack which was worthy of Russian technology in the way that it took place.
Perhaps I may comment on some of the issues that have been raised. To the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, I say that the precedent in Scotland is one that has been brought about by the Scottish Government for the Scottish referendum; it does not necessarily affect where we go from here in the rest of the United Kingdom.
The noble Lord, Lord Lexden, listed the social dimension of party youth wings. The particularly close nature of that social dimension among young people of one sort or another is something that I remember well; indeed, I met my wife at a Young Liberal conference.
How to re-engage young people in politics and how far citizenship education relates to that seem to me to be at the core of this debate. My own personal view is that the need to make sure that citizenship education is taken more seriously in schools, with all the other pressures on the curriculum, is in many ways the most powerful argument for considering lowering the voting age. We are all of us here, I am sure, committed to more effective citizenship education and encouraging young people to vote. I am not myself persuaded, nor are the Government, that making the first vote compulsory would help in this regard. I was wondering, as the noble Baroness was suggesting it, how we would enforce it. Would we impose fines on young people for not voting or would we send them to prison? Would we have compulsory service of some sort? There are real problems in insisting on compulsory voting if we want to put penalties on it.
I strongly share the noble Baroness’s views about active citizenship. As I have said previously, having started as an initial sceptic about the citizen service scheme which the Conservatives initiated, I have become a convert. I have found that through that young people find that working within their own community and promoting projects to help others within it is something which 15 and 16 year-olds are capable of and can enjoy, and it gives them a sense of local engagement. I suspect that we need to spend more time working on community councils—really local councils, which we have lost—if we are to re-engage an awful lot of people with politics. There is a whole host of issues there which are not within the frame of this debate.
I think that I heard the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, say that every young person should be equipped with a national security number.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
All thoughts of shadows of the dominant state emerged there. For those of us who are concerned about the debate on data sharing, data protection and data privacy, I note that that is not a phrase that one would want to use lightly.
I have touched on citizenship education. The noble Baroness, Lady Smith, raised the delicate issue of taxpaying and voting. That relates particularly to the participation of overseas voters. We are unclear about the principles which would apply to voting as such.
Having welcomed the debate, the Government have no agreed view on how we should respond. I wish the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, well. I am glad to hear that the policy is in the Labour Party manifesto, and I hope that it will follow through on that commitment in its manifesto as vigorously as it did its commitment to Lords reform in its previous manifesto.
Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill
Baroness Kidron Excerpts(11 years ago)
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Baroness Kidron (CB)
My Lords, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Derby, in his evocative speech, described the voluntary and charity sector as a source of political energy. I will address my remarks to the subject of political energy.
I know that I am not alone in your Lordships’ House in my concern that young people are increasingly unmotivated to participate in the conversations and campaigns of public life. The Bill exacerbates their disengagement. As we have heard repeatedly, Part 2 simultaneously extends the scope of what is considered electoral campaigning and lowers the threshold of spending, at the same time as introducing double accounting for the spends of organisations that work in coalition. The cumulative effect of that creates the possibility of silencing the voices of campaigners and of charitable organisations.
Many of us know that a commitment to a single issue or principle is the start of a broader political understanding: a broader political journey. To curtail the voice of the third sector, which has from all quarters expressed its fear of falling foul of the Bill, is to curtail one of the most important places in which young people traditionally find their voice.
The National Union of Students is just one of many organisations that fear that the Bill will curtail the important job of introducing young people to the world of public debate and political discourse. It is concerned that the Bill’s lack of clarity and need for legal opinion will price many of its poorer branches out of politics altogether—particularly further education colleges, which noble Lords will know have a high number of students from backgrounds not adequately represented in elite sections of society. Conrad Grant, president of Goldsmiths Students’ Union, is worried about how the legislation will impact on its voter registration drives that are linked to affordable housing and a living wage for part-time work. These are two issues of increasing concern to students, particularly those faced with the London rental market.
What better way can we find to engage young people than a national debate about lowering the voting age to 16, and who better to propel that debate than the NUS? Yet NUS President Toni Pearce says that she worries greatly that the entirely legitimate and important work that student unions undertake in engaging students in politics will no longer be possible if Part 2 passes in anything like its current form. Noble Lords should bear in mind that the NUS, in complying with child protection laws, has to provide staff supervision for the under-18s, the costs of which under the new legislation would be attributable to their election spend.
The noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, referred to the issue of student fees, and the NUS believes that its 2010 Votes for Students campaign against raising student fees would fall foul of the new legislation, were it to happen at the next election. I hope that I am not alone in feeling that it is the democratic right of students—possibly their responsibility—to take a view on legislation that has such a profound effect on their education and then on the remainder of their adult lives. In this instance, the election of individual MPs was not their primary purpose, but it could in retrospect be argued that it could reasonably be regarded as looking to influence electoral outcomes, since the campaign helped to secure the election of a number of MPs who signed the pledge not to raise fees. Is it not legitimate in the ecology of our democratic processes that students take into the next election the lessons of the last?
In the new year we will see the introduction of individual electoral registration. This legislation will disproportionately affect young people as they move to educational institutions or to new towns and cities in search of work. To whom shall we turn for a campaign to put the young on the electoral roll? Perhaps to a coalition of youth-facing organisations, each of which—under the terms of this Bill—will find themselves having to account for the spend of the whole. Is it not the case that creating any barrier for organisations who work to engage young people in politics, and who encourage them to participate in our democratic processes, is doubly concerning in the context of IER? If we truly want an engaged electorate, as I believe we all do, if we want to encourage young people to feel that the political class is not disinterested, if we want a new generation to come to the table with their concerns and needs, we must drop as many barriers as possible—not reduce the ways and circumstances in which they can engage and pull up the drawbridge behind us.
Like others, I have been overwhelmed by representations revealing the anxieties of the third sector, including from a number of trade unions, mostly unaffiliated to the Labour party, which feel that the Bill creates punitive administrative burdens on ordinary working people. Noble Lords have spoken in detail about the provisions of the Bill that will curtail legitimate campaigns from charities and NGOs. As well as the practical aspects, there is the message of this Bill, which is that politics is owned by politicians—and that does untold damage to the public engagement of young people.
The purpose of the Bill, as described by the Government, is missing on the page, and I ask that they take the advice of the multiple committees whose concerned opinion we have heard this afternoon, pause the Bill, and, in doing so, take the opportunity to make more equitable the burdens on the third sector, trade unions and business. Above all, I hope that Ministers will agree that it will be a bad day for politics in its broadest sense if, instead of harnessing the political energy of the young, the Bill that they propose denies the voice of the young.