BBC World Service and British Council

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Thursday 10th July 2014 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Alton of Liverpool]

To move that this House takes note of the role of the BBC World Service and the British Council in promoting British values and interests worldwide.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I begin by thanking my noble friends on the Cross Benches for selecting this Motion for debate today. It draws attention to the role of the BBC World Service and the British Council in promoting British values, part of what Joseph Nye once described as the exercise of soft power. It sits comfortably with the debate that will follow in the name of my noble and learned friend Lord Woolf, which draws attention to the role our legal institutions play in promoting Britain’s reputation and way of life worldwide. I am grateful to all noble Lords who will participate, many of whom bring a lifetime of experience and knowledge. I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, the Minister who will reply. The House of Lords Library also deserves our thanks for the excellent note it has prepared for today’s debate.

It hardly needs saying that all of our speeches will be held against a backdrop in the Middle East of the exercise of a different kind of power, characterised by visceral hatred and unspeakable violence. They are being held in a climate in which fragile peace and seedling democracies, from the China Sea to Ukraine, are at daily risk. That is to say nothing of global violation of human rights, from North Korea to Sudan, from Nigeria to Pakistan.

More than 30 years ago as a young Member of the House of Commons travelling behind the iron curtain, and in 1981 to India, Nepal and China, I first began to fully understand the importance of the BBC World Service and the British Council as agents for change. The BBC World Service started life in 1932 as the BBC Empire Service, with Sir John Reith—later Lord Reith—warning,

“don’t expect too much in the early days … The programmes will neither be very interesting nor very good”.

More than 80 years later, with a global audience last month of 265 million people and transmitting in English and 27 other languages, there is no doubt that the World Service has surpassed all of Lord Reith’s modest expectations. Often, it has been the only lifeline to honest reporting of news and current affairs. Mikhail Gorbachev said that he listened to the BBC’s transmissions. However, both organisations—the British Council and the World Service—promote the UK’s economic interests too. In one survey of international business leaders in America, India and Australia, two-thirds said that the BBC was the main way in which they found out about the United Kingdom. Hence, the Motion talks about promoting our values and our interests.

During the past 10 years, as chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on North Korea and during visits to remote parts of Africa and Burma, my appreciation of the BBC World Service and the British Council has grown into deep admiration, not least for courageous BBC journalists, such as its chief international correspondent Lyse Doucet and the head of the BBC’s Burma service Tin Htar Swe, who were both recently honoured in the Birthday Honours List.

Courage, however, comes at a price. Let us consider the 90 journalists killed since the start of the Syrian conflict three years ago, with scores of others kidnapped, or the imprisonment of journalists in Egypt, including Peter Greste, the former BBC journalist. James Harding, the BBC’s director of news, said that these jailings were an,

“act of intimidation against all journalists”.

Getting the news out and getting the news in are therefore two sides of one coin.

In Burma, Aung San Suu Kyi says that World Service transmissions reach more than 80% of people. When I visited her in March last year, she told me that the World Service had been a game-changer. Of course, she also listened to the World Service during her many years of detention, describing it as a lifeline. Believing passionately in the power of ideas, she used her Nobel Peace Prize money to establish her own Democratic Voice of Burma radio service.

At the World Service’s 80th anniversary commemoration held in December 2012 at St Martin-in-the-Fields, I was particularly struck by the words of a young Ukrainian woman, who described how her parents had illegally concealed a radio beneath their floorboards and would bring it out clandestinely to listen to the news from London. She said that the proudest day of her parents’ lives was when she told them that she had secured a job at Bush House, where the BBC World Service was located from 1940 until 2012. Not without significance, the audience of the Ukrainian service has tripled in the past 12 months. A long-serving BBC foreign correspondent, Allan Little, recalls an elderly Jewish man in Paris who agreed to give him an interview because, as a boy in hiding in wartime Poland, the BBC was the only way he knew to keep on hoping. He also recalls the old independence fighter in Zimbabwe who hated the British yet, when he wanted to know what was happening in the world, listened in secret. He said, “We listened to you and we trusted you”.

Like many, Little regards the trust placed in the World Service and the BBC, fiercely guarded across the world and over generations, as a kind of covenant. Credibility and authority—what Peter Horrocks, the World Service director, calls “radical impartiality”—marks out the BBC from its competition in increasingly crowded airwaves and with the phenomenal growth of the internet. However, at a meeting held here just two nights ago, Mr Horrocks also pointed out that a broadcaster such as Al-Jazeera probably has a budget two to three times bigger than that of BBC News. If the BBC World Service is not to decline, I hope that the Minister will tell us that comparative resources will form part of the review of the BBC charter scheduled for next year. I hope that the Minister will also say something about the current ambiguity in the BBC World Service’s lines of accountability and its mandate.

On 1 April this year, a great and almost unremarked on change occurred when the Foreign Office ceased to fund the World Service. From now on, the £245 million bill will be borne by the licence fee payer. In January the House of Commons Select Committee which looked at this question voiced strong opposition to the plans outlined by the BBC Trust for wider commercialisation at the World Service. Its March 2014 report, The Future of the BBC World Service, outlined concerns about the impact of changes in the funding of the World Service.

Although the committee welcomed budget increases, it urged the BBC to announce detailed future funding allocations to allow the World Service to plan for the longer term. Many of us share the Select Committee’s apprehension that further commercialisation will both overinfluence the BBC’s decisions on where and what to broadcast, and diminish our ability to use the service to pursue foreign policy objectives. The example of the BBC World News offers salutary lessons. Conceived as the sister television arm of the World Service, this continuous news channel has 74 million viewers each week in 200 countries, and powerfully projects British values worldwide. Unlike radio, BBC World News is owned and operated by a commercial entity, BBC Global News Ltd, and relies entirely on subscription, advertising and sponsorship deals to survive.

The failure of the current business plan means that on the 17th of this month BBC World News is to announce what its managers are calling “significant savings”—that is, cuts. These will come on top of year 3 cuts to BBC News under the programme Delivering Quality First, which since 2010 has seen spending on news cut by 20% and the loss of 2,000 jobs in the BBC. The danger of the commercial imperative alone is that the BBC becomes dependent on it and, instead of seeing such deals as useful, it sees them as additional resource. It cannot be in the British interest for the BBC’s presence in the global media landscape to be increasingly subject to the vagaries of the ups and downs of the advertising market. It is bad for Britain’s business needs, and it is bad for the business of what Britain is all about. I hope that the Minister will do her best to allay those fears today.

In considering commercial factors versus our Article 19 obligation under the 1948 declaration on human rights to take no notice of frontiers but to communicate information worldwide, the Minister may want to comment on the example of North Korea, which was recently listed by the United Nations as a “country without parallel” and a perpetrator of human rights abuses. In the view of the author of the report, Mr Justice Michael Kirby, BBC World Service broadcasts to the Korean peninsula would be a welcome contribution to breaking the information blockade that imprisons North Korea. Professor Andrei Lankov states in his book The Real North Korea:

“The only long-term solution … is to increase North Korea’s awareness of the outside world”.

The noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, will say more on this subject when she makes her speech, and we will return to it in a Question for Short Debate in a few days.

Staying with North Korea for a moment, I particularly welcome the British Council’s English language work there, which I have seen first hand. I also welcome the work of the British Council in Burma. During my 2013 visit, I gave a lecture at the British Council library in Rangoon. I am told that the British Council receives more than 200,000 Burmese visitors to its sites in Rangoon and Mandalay each year. The libraries in Burma have more than 10,000 members and there is a network of 19 remote learning centres across the country. The British Council’s Facebook page has 340,000 “likes”—almost a quarter of the total internet users in the country.

The British Council was established in 1934 and incorporated by royal charter in 1940. It has 70 British Council teaching centres in 53 countries. It taught more than 1 million class hours to 300,000 learners in one recent year, and it describes itself as,

“the world’s largest English-language teaching organisation”.

I know that other noble Lords will speak more about its work, but let me give the example of Project English, which has benefited more than 27 million learners in India already. There is the Young Arab Voices initiative that has helped more than 25,000 young Egyptians, Tunisians and Jordanians. But in 2010-11 the FCO grant was 27% of the British Council’s income. In 2013-14 that grant is forecast to be less than 20% of total income and the proportion is projected to decrease, reaching 16% of total income by 2015-16.

Last month, the Prime Minister said that British values are,

“a belief in freedom, tolerance of others, accepting personal and social responsibility, respecting and upholding the rule of law”.

But he went on to say that these values do not come from thin air, and resources do not come from thin air either. We must be prepared to see the value of these amazing instruments of soft power and ensure that they are adequately resourced. Our military response to global threats and new forms of terror will always require hard power, of course, but we are disproportionate in spending hundreds of times more on hard power than on soft power. Combining the two, what Hillary Clinton has described as “smart power”, should be part of our approach. That is a view which was put by the House of Lords Select Committee on Soft Power and the UK’s Influence in its March 2014 report entitled Persuasion and Power in the Modern World. It said:

“The ‘reach’ of the BBC and the British Council is immense, and this certainly adds to their ability to enhance the UK’s soft power”.

Before I conclude, I highlight for noble Lords a particular work by a notable champion of soft power, the former US ambassador to Hungary, Mark Palmer, who died a year ago. I commend his book Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World’s Last Dictators by 2025. We have just 10 years left to meet the deadline he set, and I believe that the BBC World Service and the British Council have a crucial role to play in achieving that. I pay tribute to Mark Palmer, and I believe that we in this country could learn much from his ideas. We can also learn from those put forward by the British Academy, which has said in a report:

“UK foreign policy is too often conducted in a compartmentalised manner, with the would-be benefits of soft power either judged to be outweighed by security concerns, or simply never taken into account”.

Soft power is, as the report concludes,

“likely to become more important in international relations over the coming years. UK governments can help themselves simply by recognising this, and by providing enough resources for the development and maintenance of its long-term assets”.

In moving this Motion, I ask the Minister what steps Her Majesty’s Government are taking to strengthen the deployment of soft power, how we are going to combine soft power with hard power, and to affirm, as I hope she will, our continuing belief on all sides of the House that the BBC World Service and the British Council are indispensable in promoting British values and interests throughout the world.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Alton of Liverpool]

My Lords, I am extremely grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, for the way in which she has responded to what has been an amazingly rich and incredibly well informed debate. All the speeches in your Lordships’ House today have come from either personal or professional experience. The number of people who said that they had heard the World Service in remote parts of the world was striking. We travelled from the remote parts of the Borneo borders to the Arctic Circle, and we were also in Tehran, Beijing, Afghanistan, North Korea, Egypt, Russia, Juba and even at one point Glasgow. We have travelled widely.

We also heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick of Undercliffe, and the noble Lord, Lord Bach, along with my noble friend Lady Prashar, their first-hand experiences of either being trustees or working today in the British Council or, in the case of my noble friend Lord Williams, of being a trustee of the BBC World Service. They gave professional and intimate accounts. The noble Lord, Lord Bach, described himself as a child of the British Council, his father having worked for it. I can only say that if that is his parentage then the British Council has a great deal to be proud of, as we do in this House, because he is a pretty good advertisement for it.

We also heard about the importance of the foreign languages that can be promoted via the British Council and the BBC World Service, and our Commonwealth links. Regarding soft power versus propaganda, the noble Lord, Lord Parekh, made an important point about moral authority. We talked about accountability and the question of values. I think it was Gertrude Himmelfarb who said that sometimes “values” is rather a weak word in comparison with “virtues”. However, I think that perhaps we are also rather modest in this country and do not like to talk about any of our institutions. The British Council and World Service were described by my noble friend Lord Williams as “two renowned and much loved” institutions. We do not often like to talk of them in quite that way, but we have nothing to be ashamed of. These are two wonderful institutions that reach vast numbers of people all over the world.

It was the Prime Minister, describing values, who said that British values are,

“a belief in freedom, tolerance of others”—

“tolerance” was a word that my noble friend Lord Jay returned to—

“accepting personal and social responsibility, respecting and upholding the rule of law”.

That is a pretty good starting point. We may have others that we want to add to the list, and we may have concerns, as the noble Lord, Lord Watson, described, but at least today’s debate has given us a framework.

As we proceed to the triennial review of the British Council and think about the future funding of the BBC World Service, the Government will be in no doubt as a result of today’s debate that your Lordships in all parts of this House—even though the debate was initiated from the Cross-Benches, there have been valuable contributions from all parts of the Chamber— will be watching not just with apprehension and concern but in the great hope that the Government will continue to support both the World Service and the British Council. With those remarks, I conclude the debate.

Motion agreed.