Soft Power and the UK’s Influence (Select Committee Report)

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Tuesday 10th March 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, it would be pretty justifiable to complain rather vigorously that it should have taken so long to bring forward this important report and the Government’s response to it for debate on the Floor of the House. The fact that we are debating it in the final weeks of the Session after the Session in which it was tabled surely tells us something about the adequacy or inadequacy of our procedures for allotting priorities. The only off-setting benefit is—here I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Howell—that the intervening events have brought many of the findings of this excellent report into sharper focus and given them greater urgency. The background now is not so much one of a Britain that prides itself on punching above its weight as of a Britain that is beginning to punch well below its weight. This is the view of a number of recent reports from committees in the other place and many distinguished commentators; I share that view. That should be, I fear, a worrying coda for the outgoing Government and an alarm call for whoever takes office after the election on 7 May.

The report, which was so skilfully chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Howell, and so eloquently introduced by him this afternoon, deserves much praise. It has taken the concept of soft power, first identified and defined as such not all that long ago by Professor Joseph Nye of Harvard University, and disassembled that concept to examine its component parts so far as this country is concerned. It has done so with commendable thoroughness and, in doing so, it has avoided falling into the trap of seeming to argue that soft power can in some way replace or compensate for the absence or inadequacy of hard power. It cannot do that. A country’s soft power and its hard power are indissolubly linked, so in debating Britain’s soft power today we must not lose sight of the crucial need for important decisions to be taken early in the next Parliament on Britain’s hard power resources—on Trident replacement, equipment and the size of our Armed Forces—which will affect our soft power, too. If we continue to shrink those resources, we shall as a country have less influence over events. When all is said and done, effective national influence is the combination of soft and hard power.

The report’s identification of our main soft power assets is comprehensive and compelling. I would put the BBC World Service right up there at the front of the assets; I wish that I was more confident than I am that it will be sustained there. The decision to switch the World Service’s funding from the Government to the licence fee was, let us face it, a gamble, and it is too soon to say whether it will prove a successful one. However, there should surely be some ring-fencing of the resources available to the World Service within the BBC’s assets and some clear government involvement in defining the World Service’s strategy, though not its operations. This issue needs to be looked at again in the context of the next charter review in 2016. It is no coincidence that radio, television and digital communications bulk so large in other Governments’ soft power strategies. If you want an example, you could look at RT, although admittedly it owes more to Dr Goebbels than to Lord Reith. We need to bear that example in mind when we consider how adequate the resources for the World Service are.

There is then the higher education sector, the significance of which as a soft power asset continues to grow. Not only are our universities one of our most successful sources of invisible exports; they are creating soft power for Britain for many decades ahead. Who doubts that those overseas students who flock to our universities will carry with them, through their professional lives, values and links that will be of benefit to this country? Yet the Government, by clinging obstinately to a net migration target that includes students as its largest component, and by piling new costs and visa complexities on to those students, are, for all their protestations to the contrary, putting that at risk. It is surely high time that all the main parties stopped regarding and targeting students as economic migrants, as this report rightly recommends.

The Diplomatic Service continues to be squeezed in successive rounds of spending cuts, which is surely a false economy. The sums involved are small, but over time the soft power losses will be real—all the more so if we continue to put disproportionate emphasis on what our overseas posts can reasonably be expected to do in trade and investment at the cost of their ability to be our eyes, ears and interpreter of events in an ever more rapidly changing world. A purely transactional, mercantilist approach to foreign policy is not likely to be a winning formula.

My one major criticism of the report relates to its handling of the European Union dimension in our soft power. It underestimates that dimension. In many areas of external policy—in trade and the environment, to give just two examples—the EU dimension is our soft power. If we had to do without that dimension following an in/out referendum that supported our withdrawal from the EU, we would have to start from scratch. We would be a bit player in a complex world. My experience in the closing stages of the Kennedy round in the 1960s, which was the last occasion when Britain negotiated separately in a major trade round, does not encourage an optimistic view of how much influence we would have.

An odd view that we should aspire to have a role distinct from a collective EU one has also crept into the report, but collective EU endeavours have to be agreed by us in the first place. How can we hope to benefit or be trusted if we first agree to the EU’s collective role and then strike out on our own? I was glad to see that the Government’s response to the report declined to sup from that poisoned chalice.

I do not wish to end on a critical note. I agree wholeheartedly with the report’s recommendations that the Government need to report regularly to Parliament on Britain’s soft power, and that both Houses need to examine and debate such reports and express their views. I hope that the Minister, when he replies to the debate, will undertake that these recommendations will be taken forward and responded to after the election.