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Middle East and North Africa

I would make it clear to the noble Lord that the words I said on Friday were carefully chosen. I did not say that I would revisit the cuts; I said that my right honourable friend the Foreign Secretary was looking at the proposals that had been put to him by the BBC World Service and examining the reasons and explanations for the decisions that it wants to take. At the heart of these is the view of the BBC World Service authorities, under whom these decisions have to be made, that the short-wave services are not the best way and the priority way of maintaining communication and our voice and influence in the Arab world. They point to the fact that—we debated this at length on Friday—although radio is still extremely important, up and coming are online services, a mass of television services, iPad services, mobile internet services and a thousand other things which are creating the opportunities to convey good messages and, I am afraid, some bad ones as well. Those are the conditions of the modern world that have empowered the street, as it were, more than ever. What I said on Friday reflects exactly the position at the moment. My right honourable friend the Foreign Secretary is certainly looking at it and discussing it with the BBC but it is up to the latter to decide how it wants to react within the inevitable parameters of the budget, which are unavoidable for all sorts of reasons I do not want to go into now. As to the noble Lord’s wider point, he is absolutely right—the situation has changed. As to whether that should have been predicted exactly, some of us indicated more than a decade ago that this sort of world was emerging. The situation has changed in the Middle East. There could be entirely new relationships between peoples and Governments and parties and politics and military forces. In these circumstances we must be agile and review the disposition of our influences and our programmes. The noble Lord is right about that and I agree with him.