Government Departments: Soft Power

Lord Alderdice Excerpts

Thursday 28th April 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Alderdice]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, on securing this important debate. Particularly at times of international crisis and pressure there is a mistaken tendency for us to focus on so-called hard power, and soft power can be crowded out. The noble Baroness has enabled us to focus on this important matter.

I say at the start that it is very important to clarify that those of us who regard soft power as important do not at the same time regard hard power as unimportant. On the contrary, I come from a part of the world where I am very much aware that special forces, intelligence gathering, the increasing use of cyberdefence and all the rest of the paraphernalia of hard power are extremely important, though sometimes they are at their strongest when they are used as a threat rather than when they are actually implemented. We are seeing a little of that at the moment in various parts of the world. It is very important that we sustain the capacity to project hard power, which has been leaking away in recent decades. However, it is true that sometimes those who emphasise soft power find it difficult to bring the two together. The noble Baroness pointed out earlier that DfID, for example, sometimes seeks to distance itself in a way that is, frankly, wholly inappropriate. It is very important that the various components work together in this regard. Therefore, I emphasise that when we speak today about soft power it is not as an alternative to, but as a component of, the projection of power of this country.

In recent decades there has been a hesitation to speak about the projection of power of our country as though there was something wrong with that and we should be much more held back and reticent about these things. If our country can be a power for good why should we not be proud of that projection of power? We do not have a history of always being perfect in that regard, but no country has. Anyone who travels around the world with open eyes and an open mind can see that this country has had a tremendous influence for good in many parts of the world and can continue to do so. If we do not ensure that we project that power, others with more malign attitudes will.

One of the difficulties has been that in the country as a whole, and perhaps in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office too, there has been a feeling that there are other countries with greater population and more access to resources and commodities, which must inevitably mean a falling away of power for our own country. There is some truth to that. However, when countries fell away, it was not fundamentally because their populations diminished or their resources and commodities decreased and were exhausted, but rather because their conviction about their purpose failed them.

For me, the important power that our country has and the contribution it can give lie in some of the things that the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, was talking about—our convictions and the things we believe in. The issue is not just about our systems of government, but the culture of our government and the way that we do things. These are important and we should continue to project them. They strengthen us as a country. As they strengthen us, there are other social and economic benefits for our country. This is not merely an altruistic question.

That is why it is so short-sighted to be reducing our capacity to project our ideas through, for example, the BBC World Service. I ask the Minister to confirm what I understand was said recently to the House of Lords Communications Committee by the deputy chair of the BBC Trust: that when the BBC takes over full responsibility in 2014, it will restore the funding of the World Service, and that the current cuts are primarily the responsibility of the Foreign Office. If that is true, can the Minister assure us that that matter can be attended to directly within government at this point, and not simply passed on to the BBC, which does not yet have full responsibility? I should welcome clarification on that. A number of other noble Lords with much more experience of the BBC World Service have spoken much more eloquently about it than I.

I should like to focus on two or three other areas in the time at my disposal. It has always surprised me how few people in this country realise what an extraordinary jewel the British Council is. I pay tribute to the previous Government who increased its funding over a period. It is important that that funding is sustained as much as possible over the next period, although there are threats to it. That is not to say that I entirely go along with some of the strategic judgments of the British Council.

For example, I remember that some years ago I was concerned about what was happening in Peru and other parts of Latin America. Money was being taken away, DfID offices closed and the British Council office in Peru was closed—as happened in a number of other Latin American countries—and all the funding was funnelled away to places such as China, because that was supposed to be the big area of growth and development. Frankly, I do not care how many British Council offices you put in China, they will not make a great deal of difference there. However, they would make an enormous difference in places such as Peru. The policy was particularly extraordinary, given that this country is one of the biggest investors in Peru. Yet that somehow did not seem to matter. Here was a country where we had real links and understandings. It was a country coming out of conflict after the Shining Path. We did not pay attention. We reduced our funding and influence on programmes of government. Now we find that Peru is in the middle of a political crisis and is sliding back towards authoritarianism and political fascism. We are not there and we could be doing something good in a relatively smaller country where our budget would make possible real improvement in development. That would not be possible in a country such as China.

I want to ask questions not just about how much money we put into places but about our strategy and the way that we try to deal with these issues—including in our own country. It is surprising that the British Council is not more to the fore in teaching English as a foreign language to the many people in our country for whom English still a foreign language, given that the British Council has extraordinary experience of this throughout the world. Yet, even in my own part of the world, Northern Ireland, where the peace has brought us many people from other parts of the world, the British Council is not being used as it might be in this regard.

I come back to another area that I have mentioned a number of times, and about which I know that my noble friend the Minister feels very strongly: the importance of the Commonwealth. Here we have a remarkable institutional opportunity to use soft power in a striking way. Not only the previous Government but others before them focused on the development of our relationships within Europe and outside. I am a strongly pro-European Member of this House, but our interests and relationships in Europe do not have to be at the expense of relationships with the Commonwealth. Our friends the French have not diminished their commitment to the Francophonie with their commitment to the European Union. I sometimes think that we feel that it has to be one or the other; this is simply a dreadful mistake. I seek an assurance, which I know will not be hard for the Minister to give because he is personally very committed, that the Government recognise and are continuing to build our relationships within the Commonwealth, which are of enormous importance.

The terms of the Motion address the question of departmental co-operation. This is important. For example we have, in government departments that have responsibility for policing services throughout our country, a tremendous resource when developing policing systems in other parts of the world as part of post-conflict development. We have in our medical schools and colleges throughout the country all sorts of ranges of skills. Some of them come simply from long-term academic commitments and some from the experiences that we have had in our own country and in other places. Our educational system is a huge resource and strength for us, and yet at the moment I despair of the attitude that seems to be around that we should obstruct students from other parts of the world from gaining access to our courses because of some notion that they might decide to stay. The truth is that the vast majority of students at a senior level take what they learn from us back to their own countries and become part of a network of ambassadors for our country all around the world for the rest of their professional careers.

This is not something that only we recognise. I am working with Martti Ahtisaari, a former President of Finland and a Nobel Prize winner. He wants to do something for sub-Saharan Africa, and for north Africa. With the rest of us, he is trying to establish a fund to bring 100 PhD students to universities in this country. As a former President of Finland, he recognises that the best place in Europe for them to come is to this country, to some of our best and most esteemed universities, because they will not just learn academic subjects but become imbued with a culture that can strengthen democracy, as well as professional and academic development, in their own countries. It does not come out of books or down the line; it comes when you soak up—as young students do, like sponges—the culture of the country in which you have come to live and study, and which you then take back to your own country.

Finally, I will say something not just about government departments but about this Parliament. It is the mother of Parliaments. We should hang our heads a little at how we have behaved over the past few years, and at how we are perceived; but our reputation and standing are not yet completely gone. I appeal to the Government to understand that this Parliament, in both its Houses and in all its aspects and Members, is a tremendous resource for the development of democracy in other parts of the world, and to see this as a resource that can be used through WFD, the IPU, CPA and all the relationships that we can use and develop.

Again, I thank the noble Baroness for bringing this opportunity to us. I hope that the Foreign Office in particular will accept responsibility not for looking to a continual sliding down of the strength and power of this country, but for taking the opportunity to develop all its resources and move forward with pride and a sense of ourselves as a country that has something to give to the rest of the world.