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Miss Nicholson: As I was saying, audibility is vital. If one cannot hear, it is no good--I should know.
If Britain had no independent voice in the world, this country would be a poorer place culturally, educationally and economically. British business says that the World Service boosts British trade in securing exports. In a recent survey, the top 50 United Kingdom companies said that the BBC World Service creates an aura of trust for Britain abroad and makes their job easier. The return in trade and export earnings must be vast.
If the World Service did not exist, not only Britain would be deprived. The whole world would be a poorer place, as so many parts of it rely on the World Service for factual, impartial broadcasts and for that invaluable commodity, the truth, which is in short supply in times of conflict and danger. In times of crisis--wars, famines, revolutions and earthquakes--the BBC's audience overseas rockets. In the affected region and the country under scrutiny, many people rely specifically and only on the BBC for news. How can Ministers evaluate that in terms of pounds, ecus or roubles? The World Service is a brand leader without equal, envied around the globe in war and peace.
I am sure that the new BBC chairman will be successful, and that his fund of knowledge and experience will be put to good effect, but I am sad that the procedure of the appointment and its announcement by the Government did not adhere to the constitutional position in the 1981 BBC charter. We must not drop full preservation of political impartiality, as the Government have done.
As we have already heard, the BBC also exports the English language, not just on the air but in educational videos, audio tapes and written packages. Millions listen to it for that reason alone. What value can be put on that internationally? The extensive and growing use of English in the world not only involves transmitting our language but boosts the work of our publishers and authors.
In political and strategic terms, many world leaders, having had their first contact, when young, with British values and activities through the BBC World Service, retain a special relationship with us, and a fondness for our attitudes, which influences their decisions beneficially in favour of our views.
What about human rights activists and political prisoners, such as Solzhenitsyn and Aung San Suu Kyi, and hostages such as Terry Waite? How did they praise the BBC World Service? They saw it as their lifeline and morale booster, especially the emergency Gulf link programme, which was the forerunner of other lifeline crisis programmes for Bosnia, Rwanda--whose programme was partly non-governmental organisation funded--and Somalia when they were otherwise unreachable. How can that be measured in money?
We must not forget the World Service's science, development, environment and health education programmes. Radio reaches where other media cannot-- to the blind and the illiterate, for example. As I know, television reaches where the deaf cannot understand in any other way, through subtitling.
How many hundreds of babies in India may have been saved from a lifetime of blindness through BBC World Service radio broadcasts on the importance of vitamin A? How many babies in Peru and Bolivia have been saved
from death at birth by the BBC's "Quecha" health programme? How many teenagers have learned to avoid the risks of HIV and AIDS, and how many civilians have learnt how to avoid the risks of land mines? This development may be cheap to the Government, but it is beyond price to those who receive it. How do we add up the lost eyes and limbs in the profit-and-loss accounts?
Selfishly, I declare a keen interest in the BBC Arabic service, the value of which I have seen in refugee camps in the Persian Gulf.
The value of the World Service is therefore incalculable, while the cuts and their effects are all too frighteningly calculable. We know the figures: a modest, in terms of the national Budget, £4.5 million cut in the financial year 1997-98. That will amount to a £10 million shortfall in the overall operating budget of £135 million. To put it in a national budgetary perspective, that is the cost of three or four modern aircraft, of which we lost three last week.
I say most sincerely that we must also be careful that the Government, in forcing the BBC to pursue the private finance initiative, do not compromise political and commercial impartiality. The necessity for long-term planning makes the PFI a fragile answer.
Perhaps the cuts are being made in the wrong places and for the wrong reasons. The BBC World Service has just dropped French for Europe, and the German service, already reduced, may be cut further. That is in despite of our membership of the European Union and the need to put over Britain's views in countries where many people still do not speak English.
The entire European Union surely seeks to hear our values, and listens keenly to statements of our interests. Our thoughts are needed in the democratic development of the Union. Fifty per cent. of the BBC's transcription topical tapes service, which accounts for much of the work in the developing world, has been cut off. That is surely another implicit cut in overseas aid, this time in education.
Of course, not everything is gloom and contraction. The BBC has played a valuable part in training and in revitalising broadcasting. Despite international competition and the end of the cold war, audiences are increasing. New services have been started in Macedonian, in Azeri for Azerbaijan, and in Uzbek for Uzbekistan. The Arabic service, which proved its worth again in the Gulf war, may expand alongside the newly created Arabic television service.
Some countries re-broadcast the BBC 24 hours a day-- Singapore, Australia and New Zealand. A new joint service, which began on 1 January in partnership with a United States station in Boston, is attracting many more listeners to hear our values, culture and output in north America.
That success story can be disrupted by the cuts we are discussing. The BBC has to invest to survive. It plans to put its service on the Internet, not only in English but in, for example, Cantonese, to exploit high computer ownership in Hong Kong. Surely that will be a valuable back-up to our influence in Hong Kong after the transfer to China in 1997.
We have already heard that the BBC has to replace its weak and aging transmitter in Masirah and relocate it on the mainland of Oman at a cost of £30 million, to be
funded under the PFI. That involves not only the difficulty that he who pays the piper calls the tune but the question of repayment, which will place a further burden on operating costs. Yet that transmitter and its impartiality are vital for reaching the Persian Gulf and the Indian subcontinent, where the BBC has such a large and vital audience, with vast trading potential; and, in the case of the Indian subcontinent, English is an inherited language.
The cuts, combined with necessary investment, will also, in time, put more foreign language programmes at risk--perhaps 25 per cent. of them, or 10 out of the present 40. That means that threats will hang over transmissions in Czech, Slovak, Slovene, Hungarian and Romanian, and perhaps even in Serb and Croatian, to the cauldron of the Balkans. Hon. Members will recall what an important factor the BBC was in the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia, the abortive Hungarian revolution, the overthrow of President Ceausescu, the collapse of the Warsaw pact as central Europe rediscovered democracy, and above all the ending of the communist stranglehold on the USSR.
It is possible that the Spanish and Portuguese services to Latin America may be dropped.
Mr. Jacques Arnold:
Will the hon. Lady give way on the subject of Latin America?
Madam Deputy Speaker:
Order. The rule is quite clear. If the hon. Member who has the Floor does not wish to give way, he or she is under no obligation to do so.
Miss Nicholson:
Latin America is a vast area of more than 300 million people, with enormous trade potential for the UK, as so many recent ministerial visits indicate.
Not so long ago, during the Falklands war, the UK Government created their own Radio Atlantico del Sur, which proved so amateurish and ineffectual, whereas World Service correspondents were greeted in the Falklands by banners of gratitude proclaiming, "God Bless the BBC!"
Foreign Office Ministers would be foolish to ignore, as they have in the past, the dangers of the Falklands sovereignty dilemma, which still exists, as does Argentina's deadline of the year 2000 for taking over the Falklands, just when there may be vast oil riches to be found off their shores.
The Government continually fail to learn the certain lessons of the past in order to anticipate the uncertain lessons of the future. I fear that, where the dictators and oppressors have failed, our Treasury Minister bookkeepers, aided by a weak-willed, blinkered and ostrich-minded Cabinet, will succeed in weakening or eventually silencing altogether a powerful voice for Britain.
In conclusion, I have a couple of old tributes that are well worth repeating. They may stick in the minds of Ministers more than anything else. Even a rival and critic such as Teheran Radio said:
"England without the BBC is a lion without mane or tail, whose funeral will soon be due."
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