Government Departments: Soft Power

Lord Fowler Excerpts

Thursday 28th April 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Fowler]

My Lords, I have been in a debate like this before, back in 1981 in the other place when I was Transport Secretary. After many attempts, the Commons rightly used my transport Bill to introduce compulsory seatbelts for the first time in this country. You might have thought that the next day it would have been front page news, but not quite, because the morning’s papers were dominated by another event that would happen that day—the marriage of Charles and Diana. We may well find that this debate is also overshadowed, but that in no way reduces its importance.

I congratulate the noble Baroness on the excellent way in which she introduced the debate. I shall pick up one part of what she said, about the BBC World Service and journalism generally. The best of British journalism can have a big influence for the good. Honest and independent reporting of what is taking place can influence a debate inside a country; it can inform a bigger audience around the world, and when done well it brings credit to this country. I am talking here about journalism, not newspapers indulging in practices such as phone hacking that want nothing more than the information on the private lives of real and imagined celebrities. To my mind, that is not journalism but a form of unjustifiable prying, which has rightly been declared illegal, and I look forward to the day when the Government announce that they will set up an inquiry into how this can be prevented.

The kind of journalism that I am talking about is truthful, independent reporting that deals with important national and international issues and is not influenced by the prejudices and views of proprietors. I am also talking about fearless reporting, which we have been reminded of recently by the deaths of two journalists in Libya—the latest casualties in a long line of those whose jobs as reporters have put them at risk. There are outstanding examples in this country of the kind of journalism that I am talking about, and the kind of journalist, not least in the BBC—not the game show hosts, but reporters such as John Simpson, Jeremy Bowen and people of that kind.

We should not ignore the influence that this kind of journalism can have. I am chairman of the Thomson Media Foundation, which was formed half a century ago by Roy Thomson. I took over from my noble and learned friend Lord Howe some years ago. In the Middle East, we run inquirer rewards for investigative journalism, with entries from Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Gaza and the West Bank and investigations into prison conditions and healthcare. This has been funded partly by the Foreign Office, and I pay tribute to it for that. In the gentlest way possible, I would love to know what future plans there are, following my letter of about six or seven weeks ago.

I will concentrate on the BBC World Service. I remember in 1967 being sent off by my newspaper to the Middle East war. After a rather hairy journey by fishing boat, my colleagues and I arrived in Beirut. Our aim was to get to Damascus and Amman, but for some time the borders were closed and news was censored. My abiding memory of that period was of an American journalist with his ear to the transistor radio, desperately trying to get the latest, accurate news of what was happening in the war. The World Service in those days was the gold standard.

Things have obviously changed since those days. We have channels providing 24-hour television news; in the Middle East, which I seek to concentrate on, we have powerful new channels such as Al-Jazeera; and we have the internet playing an increasingly important role. Nevertheless, taking a worldwide perspective, the BBC World Service has a formidable audience of 180 million people and retains a formidable reputation, which is paid tribute to by a wide range of people including Kofi Annan, who said that it is,

“perhaps Britain's greatest gift to the world”.

That is some praise.

The service has sought to develop as conditions have changed. It has started an Arabic television service, which has become a 24-hour service—partly, perhaps, because of the urging of the Communications Committee of this House. In the Arab world its online audience has gone up, as the noble Baroness was saying, by something like 300 per cent in the past few months, while it should never be forgotten that radio remains a powerful medium internationally, just as it does in this country. I do not claim that the development has been perfect, but that has often been because of lack of funds and sometimes perhaps because of a lack of vision in its funding department. One story, told some years ago, was that the Foreign Office was highly sceptical of one bid on the grounds that it did not really think that the internet would ever catch on.

What I know for certain is that the World Service has always had to fight hard for the resources that it needs. That certainly applied in the Thatcher years, and I remember the then Foreign Secretary, my noble and learned friend Lord Howe, battling away for money at that time. I was always rather divided between the prospect of the former Chancellor being made to appear before the public spending hanging jury, where he had sent so many of us, and supporting his cause. In the end, I supported his cause.

There have been problems in the past, and there should be no doubt about that, but nothing, I suggest, on the scale of what is now being envisaged: cash savings of 20 per cent over the next three years; the closure of five full language services; and the end of radio programmes in seven languages. Overall, the service will lose an audience of something like 30 million people. To take the impact on just the Arabic service, as the noble Baroness indicated, in a month’s time the television service will reduce from 15 live hours of news a day to seven hours by cutting out overnight and morning coverage. Yet it is competing with Al-Jazeera. Radio will be cut from 12 hours a day to seven, and 44 of the Arabic staff will be made redundant. Yet two days ago, my noble friend, who is now sitting on the Front Bench, repeated a Statement by the Foreign Secretary on the Middle East: war in Libya, crisis in Syria, unrest in Yemen and Bahrain and crucial decisions in Palestine, not to mention Egypt and Tunisia. The question that has to be asked is whether this is conceivably the right time to be cutting back on the World Service. No one blames the Government for not foreseeing what has happened in the past months in the Middle East—I do not think that many, if any, actually did—but the point is that it has happened and we now need to respond to this new situation.

Personally, I agree with the Foreign Affairs Committee of the other place, under the excellent chairmanship of my friend Richard Ottaway, that the decision on cuts should be reversed. Let me put the point another way. All the evidence suggests that the decisions on funding and transfer to the BBC were taken very quickly without exploring the options. I am not opposed in any way to responsibility going to the BBC, but if that is going to be the case, guarantees need to be written in. We might look at options for change there that would provide resources without affecting the BBC overall. Frankly, it would be to everyone’s benefit, and it would make a financial saving, if the BBC Trust were abolished and the noble Lord, Lord Patten, could become the proper chairman of the BBC with a board rather than, as at the moment, “chairman” being an honorary title. I certainly believe that it would be to the benefit of the commercial arm of the BBC, BBC Worldwide, and would mean financial gain to the corporation, if it were allowed to raise private capital to develop. That would mean changing the ownership structure, a course that was actually first set out by the previous Labour Government.

To explore these options—and there are others, such as funding from the DfID budget—will obviously take a little time, rather more than the six or seven days that it took to produce the present policy. No one would criticise the Government for a moment if these cuts were put on hold while the new situation, particularly the situation in the Middle East, was considered further along with other options.

We should remember above all that the BBC World Service is truly a world leader, that it brings credit on this country and that it is remarkably cost-effective for the good that it does. I urge the Government to think again on policy here and start fresh talks with the BBC. We should recognise that a new situation has arisen, and we should be thinking of developing the World Service, not cutting it back.