British Council: Funding

Lord Alderdice Excerpts

Thursday 19th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Alderdice]

My Lords, I too am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Bach, for securing this debate. He is a very distinguished chair of the APPG and I am happy to be a member of that group. Like him I have a family connection with the British Council. My cousin David has served in it for a lifetime in many different parts of the world, including Baghdad after the war, which is not the most comfortable of places. He is finishing his career back home in Northern Ireland.

That is where I would like to start. There has been a lot of discussion about how the British Council’s activities display our culture in other parts of the world and how beneficial that is outside the United Kingdom. It became clear to me as the Speaker of the Northern Ireland Assembly that it was easy to involve nationalist people and politicians in the work of the British Council despite people’s fears sometimes that it might be otherwise. The British Council is not the English Council. It presents all the cultures, Welsh, Scottish, English, Northern Irish—and not just pro-British Northern Irish, but Irish culture of all kinds. People from the nationalist community, including politicians, were happy to become involved in the British Council’s work. It was a helpful facility in binding people together.

There is a great deal that we have to give. Culture—I do not use the word lightly—is not just music, art, drama and literature. There are important aspects of our culture in the way that we conduct parliamentary democracy: that is part of our culture. Our adherence to human rights and the way that we implement them, policing and the administration of justice are also aspects of our culture. That is why I am proud that the British Council takes up those things too. It involves all sorts of people projecting important elements of British culture of all kinds and making a profound contribution to the rest of the world as well as to ourselves.

It has always astonished me that this remarkable organisation is so little known at home and so widely respected abroad. If it has one flaw it is perhaps a classic British flaw. It does not tend to blow its own trumpet at home, even though it is so well known abroad. My advice to it is to recognise that at home it is important that people understand more of its work. Like my noble friends Lord Dholakia and Lady Hooper I participated earlier today in the debate on the UK Border Agency. In a sense the two organisations are at opposite extremes. One sullies the reputation of the United Kingdom in the way it functions. It costs us a huge amount of money to annoy almost everyone who comes in contact with it and brings us no benefits to our reputation, whatever other good things it might do. The other, the British Council, is a remarkable organisation, which improves the reputation of the United Kingdom. Quite extraordinarily, we can get other people in the rest of the world to pay us to develop the British Council and to teach them our language, which benefits us and is absolutely remarkable.

It is a very long time since a rather dismissive military leader questioned how many legions the Vatican had—how many legions the Pope had. In doing that, he was dismissing the lack of power of the Vatican. That military leader is now dead, gone and largely forgotten, and the power of the Vatican continues. Increasingly one might ask how many legions we have in the United Kingdom. The answer is less and less. But there is no reason why we cannot have more and more influence and power through spreading our culture in all its different ways, and having the rest of the world coming to us and asking us to do this.

What is the hindrance? The hindrance is any lack of vision and appreciation that we might have at government level and, to some extent, a sense that promoting ourselves, our language and our culture is something we are a little less happy to do than our American cousins. We should be proud of it and we should promote it. It is not just in our interests. If we really believe in it, our culture has a contribution to make to the rest of the world and no one does it better than the British Council.