Government Departments: Soft Power

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Thursday 28th April 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

My Lords, holding a debate on how this country should best marshal and make use of its soft-power assets is surely essential at a time when our hard-power assets are tightly stretched and, I would argue, underfunded to fulfil the tasks that were set out in last October’s strategy review. However, that debate on hard power is not for today. What is surely not in doubt is that, over the years ahead, we will need to rely more on our soft-power assets and learn to put them to better use if we are to sustain the capacity to protect and further our interests worldwide. I therefore welcome the initiative taken by the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Bolton, to hold this debate, all the more so as I know from personal experience how hard she worked when a Minister to improve co-ordination on conflict issues between the MoD, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and DfID —I do not mean conflict between those three departments, although in the past it has been known to occur.

My first general point is that no amount of better co-ordination, highly desirable though that co-ordination certainly is, can compensate for serious reductions in the resources available to the soft-power assets that are being co-ordinated. My second general point is that you need to co-ordinate not only over the use of soft power but over the allocation of resources to your instruments of soft power. Of that upstream co-ordination, there has been very little trace under either of the previous two Governments. First, under the previous Government, discretionary spending on conflict issues was slashed following the fall in the value of sterling in 2008. Then a number of the FCO’s scholarship programmes—the Marshall scholarships, the Chevening scholarships and the Commonwealth scholarships—were squeezed to ease pressure on the FCO budget. Then large cuts were imposed on the BBC World Service, to which many noble Lords have referred, including on the Arabic service and the Middle Eastern outreach of the World Service English programmes, just when the events in the Middle East pointed towards a need for increased, not decreased, funding, although I admit that that decision was taken before the events of what is called the Arab spring. If that is co-ordination, it was pretty well concealed. We surely need a better, more holistic approach than that.

I make no apology for concentrating heavily, as a number of other noble Lords have done, on one particular soft-power asset, the BBC World Service, which has been described, correctly in my view, in a really excellent recent report by the Foreign Affairs Committee of another place as a jewel in the crown of these assets. No one reading that report, as I did a couple of days ago, could do so without a sinking feeling that the Government have stumbled into an ill-judged and excessive cut to the World Service— 16 per cent over the next four years—without any very clear idea of the implications, above all in the Middle East.

I have two specific points to put to the Minister to which I hope he will be able to reply in responding to the debate. First, when this House debated the matter on 11 February, I and others raised the issue of the need for more, not fewer, resources for the Middle East and Arabic broadcasts. I suggested then—a suggestion that has been taken up in more detail in the Foreign Affairs Committee report to which I referred—that if DfID were to fund in some way the developmental work that the BBC already does, which has been certified as being of the value of something like £25 million a year, resources could be released without any net additional cost to the FCO budget. I wonder where matters now stand on that issue. I had a rather helpful response to a question I asked of the Secretary of State for International Development when he most impressively addressed the Cross-Benchers yesterday, and I hope that the noble Lord will be able to take that forward. Above all, when the Government respond to the Foreign Affairs Committee’s report, I hope that there will be something precise there. Surely it is time to move beyond the rather vaguely helpful remarks of the Foreign Secretary when he gave evidence to the committee.

Secondly, a wider issue about the World Service is the governance arrangements once the BBC becomes responsible for funding the World Service from the licence fee in 2014. Here again, a careful reading of that Foreign Affairs Committee report does not, frankly, inspire a lot of confidence. The decision to switch funding responsibility to the BBC was taken at the very last moment in a singularly back-of-the-envelope way. The Government’s response to queries about the future governance and how one can be sure that the priorities will not be leeched away by the needs of the BBC’s domestic services now sounds awfully like flying on a wing and a prayer. The case for a new covenant between the Government and the BBC Trust—this is what has been put forward by the Foreign Affairs Committee—seems a genuinely good idea. I hope the Minister can say that the Government broadly accept it and will work up such a covenant so that we do not have a kind of death of a thousand cuts for the World Service in 2014.

I now turn from the BBC to the issue of discretionary spending on conflict issues. The irony here is that just as we in this country have begun to achieve a degree of co-ordination in this area—which is admired and is being emulated by other countries—we have in many cases cut the resources for the programmes that we were supporting. We are withdrawing support for example in places such as the Caucasus, where such soft-power assets are really very important. Last October’s strategic review had some reasonably encouraging things to say about this sort of discretionary spending on conflict issues and about the need to do more for failing and failed states, and I wonder whether the Minister could give us some specifics about how we are approaching that now after the strategic review. Are there more than just warm words in that review?

Finally, we are debating how we in Britain are co-ordinating the use of our soft-power assets. However, here, as with hard power, we are surely in the years ahead going to need to work much more in concert with other like-minded countries in the European Union, NATO, the Commonwealth and at the United Nations if we are to maximise the impact of our soft power. I give two examples from the past. First, UN peacekeeping was virtually invented by a great British UN official, Brian Urquhart. That is a massive soft-power development over the years, which has brought peace and stability to many countries that were failed or failing states. The European Union is another example. The enlargement of the European Union has seen the most massive deployment of soft-power assets—far greater than the United States, with all its hard-power assets, has been able to deploy—and it has brought tremendous benefits, both in southern Europe and in central and eastern Europe. These multilateral institutions, of which we are members—and often very, very important members—are a really crucial part of our soft-power effort.

Of course some of our soft-power assets, such as the World Service and the British Council, are more specific to us, but there are many others in conflict prevention and post-conflict peace-building on which we need to work together. I wonder what plans the Government have for strengthening that wider co-ordination of effort so that we can make less go further and help to marshal the multiplier soft-power effect that these big international organisations can have.

If I have struck a rather critical note in this debate it is because so much needs to be done and because some course corrections are sorely needed. However, given some flexibility in application, this country could achieve a tremendous amount—it is already doing so but it could achieve far more. These soft-power assets of ours are hugely valuable and are far more valuable than the soft-power assets of practically any other country in the world, so do let us make the most of them.