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BBC World Service

These are sensible considerations to analyse in seeing how our communications systems on the planet should change. I can only say to the noble Lord, who follows these things closely, that when I was on a visit to China the other day I was told that 330 million people in that country were now online and were looking at a bombardment of media services, not just from the BBC but from a dozen other sources throughout the planet, all of which they were absorbing before turning to the older-fashioned pattern of listening to the radio. I do not deny for a moment that the noble Lord may be right and that there may be areas where the end of these language services will be a real loss. That may be so, but I suspect that there are many more areas where the loss will not be so great because of the alternatives that are developing. Television services that did not exist 10 or 20 years ago are now filling the media in these areas, particularly those that we are concerned with, with a huge new supply of information. Of course we want to make sure that our message gets through as clearly as it possibly can and we have to use all the methods that we can. However, it would not be a good message to the world if, at the same time as we were putting out our principles by communication, the word was coming over that this country was unable to tackle its debts, that it was losing its international credit status and that its economic recovery was being delayed by the near-bankruptcy, as some experts have said, into which our public finances unfortunately fell. That is where we start from and why we have to take these tough decisions.