BBC: Government Support

Lord Triesman Excerpts

Thursday 2nd December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Triesman (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Bragg, who has done us a real favour by introducing this debate. I also add my congratulations to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Liverpool. He lit a candle in his speech and, on the seventh night of Hanukkah, I am all in favour of more candles being lit.

We have a limited number of exceptional implements in our soft diplomacy toolbox. My noble friend Lady Jay and the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, a few moments ago, made essentially this point. We look for things that are practical and that speak to our values. They are easy to identify, partly because there are not that many of them—the Chevening Commonwealth Marshall Scholarships, Wilton Park, the British Council and, rightly, the BBC World Service, and I share all the anxieties expressed a moment ago by the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, about its funding.

The independence and quality of the BBC World Service is based on a broad judgment that people around the world have of the BBC itself. It fulfils many functions as an institution, as the noble Lord, Lord Bragg, said in his opening comments, but I want to focus on its independence as a news broadcaster, as an investigative powerhouse and as an entity that is not directed by the UK Government and is globally and internationally understood to have that level of independence.

I get the point that it is sometimes muddled on matters of balance. I think it has been in its climate coverage, for example, but occasional muddles are massively outweighed by the huge quality and independence. In short, the output is based on the BBC’s own processes, not on government processes or anything else. That characterisation of the BBC is, of course, not widely accepted everywhere in the world. The World Service was blocked by China over the years that I was in the Foreign Office. Diplomatic discussions with China were interesting. It alleged that we would not allow China to broadcast unimpeded to us. My view was, “Bring it on. Broadcast absolutely anything you want and let us broadcast to you”. I have no anxiety whatever about the standing of the United Kingdom in that kind of debate.

I want to quickly draw attention to one other area where the FCO, as it was in those days, advised the World Service. It was only a matter of advice, which was to refocus at that time—2005—from east and central European outlets to Farsi TV and radio output. Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, it was argued, had become media-rich and diverse in their own rights; exactly the opposite was true in 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008 in Iran. As we have learned graphically from Anne Applebaum’s remarkable book on the death of democracy, Poland and Hungary have joined countries such as Belarus as thorough dystopias. Their media have lost any distinction between their Government’s view of the truth or the fictions useful to those regimes.

I ask the Minister: will Her Majesty’s Government advise, and it will be only advice, the World Service to focus again—perhaps through enhanced shortwave broadcasting but there are, I think, a number of methods—on the central and eastern European states that I have mentioned? This is not a time for financial cuts in reaching out to broadcast to those countries. We need to understand the threat of dystopian regimes in our own near neighbourhood and recognise the extent to which destabilisation in central and eastern Europe threatens our security absolutely and directly in this country. We are seeing the reinvention in a virulent form of nationalism, xenophobia and anti-Semitism in those countries and the World Service is probably one of the best antidotes that we have available.

The qualities of the BBC may be among our best, most honest, best proven, most well-tested attributes in the circumstances I have described. As my noble friend Lord Bragg said in introducing the debate, unprejudiced public service is what the BBC provides us with. It is not designed to be an implement of foreign policy but its impact abroad is very significant, and possibly as significant as any impact it has in our domestic circumstances.