The British Council has been projecting Britain’s soft power abroad for more than eight decades. It operates on the premise that the promotion of culture and language can create goodwill towards Britain that will benefit the country in ways that are valuable but hard to estimate. Now, at a time when the country needs to be at its persuasive best, the council is being chopped back.
Sir Ciarán Devane, the chief executive, warns in a new corporate plan that the drop in the value of the pound and cutbacks at the Foreign Office are squeezing the organisation. “If we are unable to bridge the funding gap,” he says, “our ability to deliver across the developed world will be challenged.” That has already entailed 152 redundancies and agreed departures. Its headquarters is moving from The Mall in central London to cheaper premises in the East End. Soon there will be fewer sponsored visits abroad of leading British actors and musicians and fewer exhibitions of British art. Instead the council in developed countries could be reduced to being little more than a network of profitable English-language schools.
Britain’s image abroad cannot be confined to the teaching of a language. The council’s task is broader, to provide an answer and a counterweight to the growing soft power of autocratic regimes and rival states. Vladimir Putin has invested heavily in propaganda outlets such as the television broadcaster Russia Today and Sputnik, an online and radio service. BBC World Service, now funded out of licence fees rather than the Foreign Office budget, is in the midst of an information war and is nonetheless having to pare back.
Similarly, the British Council works to promote respect for human rights and democracy and balanced information. It runs, for example, English- language courses for young Sunni imams training at Egypt’s al-Azhar university in the hope that they will speak out against the violent jihad advocated by Islamic State. Since the Cold War, the British Council has provided a clarion voice against closed societies and autocratic governments. After communism collapsed, the council helped to administer the government’s Know-How Fund which exposed a new generation to democratic good practice. The networks created then still play a role in getting across the message of successive British governments.
It is difficult to measure these achievements. The inventor of the term soft power, the Harvard academic Joseph Nye, conceded that this was a problem in obtaining financial support from government. “Power, like love,” he writes, “is easier to express than define or measure — but no less real for that.” For sure, the British Council is still privileged compared with other sections of the civil service, with higher average staff salaries. It also has a collection of 8,500 paintings and sculp- tures and continues to invest money in expanding it. Plainly, the organisation still has fat to cut.
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As Britain readies itself to leave the European Union, it does, however, need to fund properly its public voices. Britain must use hard power to defend its shores but soft power to defend and promote its values. And that means attention, rather than neglect, from government. The Foreign Office is slashing a £39 million-a-year grant for non-aid work to the council. The council had hoped to make up the shortfall by bidding for a slice of the Foreign Office’s £700 million “empowerment fund”. That fund, however, has been put on ice.
Britain has an international aid budget that amounts to 0.7 per cent of gross domestic product, a sum of about £13 billion for last year. The money needed to keep the British Council afloat is a small fraction of the sums being spent on private aid contractors in countries that all too frequently rig their elections and squander that aid. It is time to reshuffle priorities in favour of a tried and tested institution that has until now served Britain well.