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UK Worldwide Interests

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Patten of Barnes, on his stimulating and challenging maiden speech, and I wish him many happy years on the Benches opposite. I say at the outset that I am an ardent supporter of all the institutions under discussion today—namely, the FCO, DfID, the British Council and the BBC World Service. I welcome the fact that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe of Aberavon, has initiated this debate, not least to dispel some misconceptions, some of which were mentioned by my noble friend Lady Symons. I also declare an interest as the British Council’s parliamentary representative to the Russian Federation and former Soviet Union. Although I greatly respect the work of all the institutions I have mentioned, I do not really see that there is a crisis at the heart of this debate. Real funding for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the British Council and the BBC World Service has increased. Overall, the FCO’s budget has increased in real terms by £143 million since 1999–2000. Following the 2004 spending review, like other departments, the FCO has to meet efficiency targets of 2.5 per cent per annum over three years. It will deliver £86 million of savings by 2007–08, and those savings will release more funds for front-line activities. The UK must respond to changing priorities. The FCO, for example, has opened 18 new sovereign and subordinate posts with UK-based staff since 1997, along with 13 locally staffed posts. Ten posts have been closed over the same period, and in this regard our record is better than that of France or Germany. There are now 268 posts compared with 266 at the time of the 1997 general election, before which the party of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe of Aberavon, was in office. In the past three years alone, reflecting the new global realities, the UK has opened missions in Baghdad, Basra, Kabul and Pyongyang. By comparison, one of the sovereign posts closed was in Nassau in the Bahamas—hardly of the same order of geopolitical importance. The FCO’s efficiency savings will also allow the UK to focus on its priority areas, including counter-proliferation, counter-terrorism, energy and climate change. In Africa, for example, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office plans to create new jobs to cover some of these issues across the region. There will be a new post in Nairobi to support work on climate change, one in Nigeria to cover energy, and one in Pretoria to cover regional issues. All these initiatives are to be welcomed, and they focus rightly on the UK’s priorities in today’s world rather than reflecting Britain’s colonial past. All this was presaged in the December 2003 White Paper, UK International Priorities: A Strategy for the FCO, which was mentioned earlier by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe. Although I do not have time to develop the argument, funding for both the BBC World Service and the British Council has also gone up. The former’s budget has risen over the past year from £225 million to £239 million, and the latter’s will increase from £172 million to £193 million in 2007–08. As has been said during the debate, of course there are always calls on further resources, and the Government must decide where their priorities lie. As has been mentioned, DfID’s spending, for example, has dramatically increased over the past few years and reflects the Government’s priorities in fighting global poverty and ill health. Who could argue with that? The Government’s aim of achieving their target of raising overseas aid to 0.7 per cent of GDP by 2013 is laudable and should be welcomed by your Lordships’ House. Coming back to the World Service, I argue that it is also right to try to shift the emphasis from eastern and central Europe to parts of the world where democracy and freedom are less in evidence. For that reason, I can see the logic of retargeting the vernacular language services away from Czech, Greek, Hungarian, Polish, Slovene, Bulgarian, Portuguese and Croatian. But Kazakh? There I have a question. In my view, axing Kazakh is a mistake. Kazakhstan under President Nazarbayev needs all the encouragement possible to become more democratic and less autocratic. Its people need to be able to hear the BBC, just as millions in the old Soviet Union used to tune in to London to listen to propaganda-light news and entertainment. When I go to Russia, people still tell me how during the Cold War they used to tune in, illegally in those days, to the BBC World Service and listen to the news from London. It was very important to them. One of the most famous journalists in Russia today is not Russian but a journalist based at the BBC in Bush House who used to broadcast to Russia. I hope that when the Minister replies he will reflect on my last point and accept my suggestion that the BBC World Service should think again before it abandons such a strategically important part of the planet.