Government Departments: Soft Power

Lord Howe of Aberavon Excerpts

Thursday 28th April 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howe of Aberavon]

My Lords, like others who have already spoken, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, for starting off the debate. I also extend special thanks to my noble friend and neighbour here Lord Alderdice for the extent to which he underlined the necessity for us to have confidence in the value of the soft power which we have all been discussing. It has been echoed by many others. I do not feel, although the word features in the debate, that co-ordination is necessarily the most important thought to have in mind. I do not mean to dismiss the idea just offered by the noble Lord, Lord Hall, but perhaps because of my experience in the Treasury, of which my noble friend Lord Fowler could not help reminding the House, I feel the real problem is that of allocation of resources, alongside discovery of the confidence in what we have, to defend and enlarge and expand with the right allocation there.

It will not be very popular to say this, but there is a problem because there are two candidates for the lion’s share of resource allocation in this area—the lion is not to the same scale in each case—the Ministry of Defence, which is as important as anything and does not have a very notorious reputation for skilful management or estimation of resources, and the other, I have to say with some regret, is DfID. The idea that it should have guaranteed access to guaranteed resources on the scale it does, as the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, pointed out, is a very powerful resource for that department. The fact that I am criticising it does not mean that I do not have a sufficiently bleeding heart. In my time in government we allocated not 0.7 per cent of GDP to the ODA, as it then was, but no more than 0.36 per cent because we felt ourselves constrained by the long running shortage of resources. One has to have that willingness to be flexible about it. I have always regretted—I would, wouldn’t I—the subsequent separation of the FCO from DfID or the ODA. I do not like one remark made by my noble friend Lord Fowler about the FCO. He suggested that it was the FCO which undervalued different aspects of it. The FCO joins with everyone who has spoken so far in recognising the value—it is the problem of allocating the resources. I feel we need to be willing to say that some things are so important that DfID should have some reduction in its allocation.

The partnership between DfID and the other Foreign Office departments was useful—it avoided duplication of bureaucratic establishments around the world: it enabled me to select rising DfID staff members and offer ambassadorships to them. I remember in particular, when I was with Her Majesty the Queen on a state visit to Nepal, feeling some pleasure that our ambassador there then, Tony Hurrell, was the first ambassador to be appointed to the Diplomatic Service from the ODA, with some pleasure being given to the department for that unification of respect. When the ambassador gave a picnic in the foothills of the Himalayas before we departed I was able to congratulate him on the knighthood conferred upon him on that visit by Her Majesty the Queen and to say that he probably did not imagine when he joined the Department of Employment as a clerk aged 18 that he would end up being knighted in Kathmandu. That integration of DfID, ODA and FCO is a virtuous state of affairs.

Beyond that, the question is how should one enhance and achieve the right balance of resources in other departments. I cannot avoid mentioning the foreign service. The noble Lord, Lord Hannay, initiated not the first debate of its kind on, I think, Armistice Day last year, pressing the need for Britain to have a properly resourced and active diplomacy. That is all part of the concerted way in which we have to make the most of our soft power, as colleagues have already been pressing. It is an area, incidentally, where full exploitation of linguistic skill is important, helping the foreign service present our wider case.

Looking at the three substantive aspects of this topic that noble Lords have so far discussed, I join my noble friend Lord Fowler and others in emphasising the immense importance of the World Service of the BBC. The reductions that have recently been imposed are, quite frankly, foolish and unjustified, and the more quickly they can be restored, the better it will be for all of us.

I can offer some anecdotal insight into the extent to which the World Service has had its impact on affairs in a remarkable series of ways. On my second visit to Yugoslavia after Tito had gone, one of the things that one had to do was visit Tito’s former residence. One of the most striking features of going there was to find that the radio set was tuned into the World Service and to hear subsequently that Tito was able to protect himself against the risk of Soviet onslaught through the information that he had been getting on the World Service about what was happening to Dubcek in Czechoslovakia. In that area, the World Service was rendering a valuable cause.

I remember also visiting for the first time Prime Minister Papandreou in Athens with our ambassador there, Sir Jeremy Thomas. That was, I think, the first meeting between a British Foreign Secretary and the Greek Prime Minister since Anthony Eden had been there. When we went to Mr Papandreou’s house to see him, one suddenly heard from behind the wall the World Service theme—

“Ta-ta-tum, tat ta-ta tum, ta ta-tum, ta ta-ta tum”—

and so on. He was at pains to tell us just how important it was for him. We know also that Mr Gorbachev and his wife heard the first news of what was happening to them in the Moscow scene on the World Service. So I cannot emphasise too strongly the importance of that.

I shall not add anything to what has been said about the British Council but I shall close with one word about a representative non-departmental public body, the Great Britain-China Centre, declaring an interest as the long-serving president of that organisation. It is a very good example of an agency that is not directly under government control. It is very well suited to the delivery of soft power, allowing work to be conducted at arm’s length from government but with the reassurance that the work is not intended to destabilise China. It allows us to call on professional expertise and initiate the discussion of important issues in China. The resources that we get from government are a grant-in-aid of £270,000, and a further £1 million is raised by us to go in support of three programmes. The first is a judicial studies training programme that has been running in partnership between this country and China for some years. I think that more than 60 judges in 34 different courts in China have recently received training of that kind. The second programme is pressing the case for better legal protection for the media. The third—this, again, is interesting—is common discussion on the use of the death penalty. As a result of that, we like to think that the legislative committee of the National People’s Congress is likely within a short period of time to reduce by 13 the number of offences that carry capital punishment in China— 68 currently do so. That is an impact of soft power in a rather unexpected place.

The final example, which no one else has mentioned but which I think can be categorised as soft power alongside the importance of Parliament, is our monarchy. In China, curiously, I had an interesting insight into the importance of the perception of our monarchy in countries around the world. At the end of our negotiations on the Hong Kong prospect and at my final meeting in that context with Deng Xiaoping, he was at pains to attach importance to the antiquity and history of our relationship. It did not start in a very good way some centuries ago but now he was anxious to pay respect to our Royals. He said:

“We have decided we can trust Britain and your government and therefore would like to invite Her Majesty the Queen to come to China on a State Visit to confirm our friendship”.

So, indeed, she did, two years after the signing of the Hong Kong Joint Declaration. On the Royal Yacht—a sadly discarded manifestation of our soft power; I think that it was soft rather than hard—we were able to entertain the entire Chinese Government in Shanghai Harbour. Tomorrow’s news, it may be thought, is another example of the importance of royal soft power among the many assets which we have and which we should promote as effectively and as strongly as we can with as many well-allocated resources as we can persuade the Treasury to undertake.