Government Departments: Soft Power

Lord Smith of Finsbury Excerpts

Thursday 28th April 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Smith of Finsbury]

My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe, although I have to observe that I will be intrigued to see what Hansard makes of the musical interlude in the middle of his speech.

I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, on initiating this debate and I thank her for it. It gives us a welcome opportunity to highlight the underemphasised, underappreciated but hugely important role that soft power plays around the world. By “soft power”, I mean what can be achieved for the improvement of international relationships and for the standing and reputation of this country through culture and the arts and through sport, learning, discourse, the exchange of ideas and thought, and creativity. Of course, it will not solve all our problems and sometimes hard power will be needed. Sometimes hard power is resorted to too readily, as was the case eight years ago in Iraq. However, soft power has much to offer in helping to shape the framework of relationships and, ultimately, in making hard power less necessary.

I want to recall three moments over the past three decades that I believe illustrate that rather well. The first was in 1983. I had just been elected as a Member of Parliament in the other House and, with my other newly elected colleague, Clare Short, I visited Turkey on behalf of a number of Turkish humanitarian organisations based in this country. Turkey at that time was under military government. Military trials were taking place and the principal purpose of our visit was to observe those trials. I also had the chilling experience of talking to people who explained in graphic detail how they had been tortured and to newspaper editors who spoke of how they feared the censor’s pen with every page that they produced.

One of the people whom we succeeded in visiting was Bulent Ecevit, who had been Prime Minister of Turkey some years previously. At the time, he was under house arrest; he was to continue to be under house arrest for another three or four years. He said to us, “My lifeline is the BBC World Service. It is the way in which I know what is happening, not just in the world but in my country”. Four years later, Bulent Ecevit was released from house arrest and went on to become Prime Minister of Turkey again. The information that that lifeline had provided him with through that period was crucial in helping to shape the policies that he subsequently put in place.

Sixteen years, later, in 1999, when I was Secretary of State for Culture, I went on an official visit to China. The principal purpose of the visit was to support the tour of the Royal Ballet to Beijing. It is a great pleasure to be speaking in the same debate as my noble friend Lord Hall of Birkenhead, whose brilliant leadership of the Royal Ballet and the Royal Opera House over recent years has been outstanding.

The Royal Ballet’s visit to Beijing was remarkable. It received standing ovations every night. It was packed out. By the time of the final performance at the end of the week, the President, Jiang Zemin, had decided that, having heard so much about it, he wanted to come to the ballet. By that time, I think that I was in Kunming. I had to get back straightaway to Beijing so that I could be there to welcome him to the ballet. Not only did Jiang Zemin arrive, but so did the Deputy Prime Minister, 10 Ministers and deputy Ministers and a collection of members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. In all, there were about 50 official guests, all sitting in a row, all leaping to their feet several times during the evening to applaud what was going on on the stage. In the interval, Darcey Bussell came backstage, and the President immediately fell in love with her.

During that interval discussion, I mentioned that over the previous week I had been trying with no success to persuade a number of different ministries and organisations to agree exchanges of television programmes between our two countries. The President looked around at the army of officials who were sitting against the wall and said, “That would be a very good idea”, and they immediately wrote it down in their notebooks. At the end of the evening, the ambassador, who was with me, turned to me and said, “This is the most impressive show of engagement with our country that we have ever seen from the Chinese Government. It has been the most remarkable event”.

Two days later, NATO bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. Thousands of protesters surrounded the British embassy in Beijing for the following week. The Ministry of Culture in Beijing phoned DCMS two days into those demonstrations to say, “Things are not terribly good between our two countries at the moment, but we just wanted to say how much we had appreciated the visit of the Secretary of State and the Royal Ballet. For us, culture is different”. Of course, within a year, relations between Britain and China had been substantially repaired.

The third incident that I want to mention took place just a couple of months ago. On behalf of the British Council I went to Slovakia to lead a series of discussions about support for the creative industries in that country. Not only did we have extremely good discussions about the importance of the creative industries and how they can be nurtured and supported, but with us was someone from the Ministry of Culture in Estonia, who said that over the past two or three years his country had been following a programme that the British Council had helped to put together of mapping, support, education and investment in the creative industries. He said how successful the programme had been.

From these various experiences I draw just two or three lessons. The first is the enormous importance of a number of key institutions. Noble Lords from all sides of the House have already spoken of these. They include the BBC World Service. It is remarkable that voices from all parts of the House have said to the Government that they really do have to think again about the cuts in funding that are now being experienced by the BBC World Service. The BBC World Service is far too precious and we should not lose what we have in that remarkable institution. These key institutions include the British Council and major arts organisations; all are facing financial stringency. They also include the best and finest of our universities. The decision of the Government to place a cap on the number of foreign students who can come to study at our universities is simply crazy. It sits alongside the even crazier decision to abandon all funding for arts and humanities teaching at our universities. The importance of nurturing and sustaining these institutions is something that we need to put at the forefront of our policy-making.

Secondly, the Motion before us specifically highlights the need to co-ordinate better between departments—the DCMS, the Foreign Office, UK Trade & Investment, BIS and the Department for Education. There needs to be much more joint working to ensure that we can make the best of the great strengths that we have in this country. There also needs to be joint working between the institutions themselves, by getting the BBC World Service, the British Council and the universities to work more closely and effectively together.

Thirdly, we need to reassert at the heart of government how crucial all this is. It is not just about co-ordination; it is also about leadership and making sure that someone at the heart of government at a senior level is leading the way in ensuring that all this happens. As a country, we are rightly ready to step up to the plate, to do what it takes and to pay what is needed when hard power is necessary. We should do the same, feel the same and act the same when it comes to soft power, too.