Don't Go Soft

Peter Preston writes:

You may, perhaps, grow a mite cynical as the Royal College of Shroudraisers piles on the decibels. I'm sorry, I remember Nye Bevan complaining that the British Medical Association only came round to grudging support for his NHS vision after he'd "stuffed their mouths with gold". But, in a smaller, quieter way, let's pause over the Royal College of BBC World Service Workers and their inevitable supporters on the foreign affairs select committee. Sometimes, as the cuts come rolling in, there is an alternative.

The World Service was a natural victim when push came to shove for the foreign secretary, William Hague. He didn't, by Whitehall standards, have a big budget anyway. Did he hack away at the diplomats, embassies and support staff he employs directly, his boys and girls on staff? Or should he transfer extra pain (16% as opposed to 10% back at the ranch) on to secondhand, contract targets like the BBC and the British Council?

Well, of course, we know the answer to that. And maybe, to be honest, we'd do the same shrinking thing in Wimpy William's place. Just as, equally unsurprisingly, we'd expect MPs absorbed by foreign affairs to disagree. They would, wouldn't they? But, this time, give the MPs credit for shrewd analysis – and an even better prescription.

By 2015, the Foreign Office will have dumped all funding for the residual World Service on a licence-fee frozen BBC. Expect cuts now, because the Foreign Office cash begins vanishing immediately; but expect more later, sadly, because (for one thing) the BBC will find it increasingly difficult to make ends meet. And there is one other important factor to this equation.

From next year every national jot and international tittle of the corporation's news-gathering resource will be clustered together in Broadcasting House's brand new, all-singing, all-dancing, all-integrated newsroom. One giant cathedral of news, on duty 24/7.

And how will the myriad World Service language teams – who don't broadcast to Britain, and thus to licence-fee payers – fare in that environment over time? Simple pressure of news priorities means they're bound to be squeezed, whatever the good intentions and warm promises now, because listeners and viewers overseas aren't paying. Licence-fee paying millions at home are having to find £145.50 a time – so surely the programmes we're stumping up for have to come first? Market forces: basic politics. That's the way this monster cookie is bound to crumble.

But the select MPs have a better idea. They think the World Service is a national adornment, a triumph of soft power. They think it's potty to hack it to pieces (losing 650 staff and 30 million listeners by 2015). So they wonder why the ring-fenced, Cameron-sanctified Department for International Development isn't taking some of the strain. The World Service costs £236m a year at current levels. By 2014, DfID's budget is scheduled to swell to £12.6bn. Some small scope for a trade-off here, surely?

India, amid slight rumblings from the backbenches and the Mail, is still a big recipient of development funds – which is worthy and defensible enough, except that the shortwave service in Hindi is one of the designated victims. Sense? You know it isn't joined-up thinking. You know, instinctively, how ministries – say, the Foreign Office and DfID – play their Sir Humphrey games of deafness and congenital buck-passing. You know it doesn't make sense.

In a sensible world, of course, services chop and change, wax and wane. Some shortwave efforts are out of time and out of audiences. But other spots on the dial – take the Middle East this Arab spring – are more vital, and more promising, than ever before. Why scorn opportunity when it comes knocking? Why play tedious games over a unique service that, once dismembered, can never be restored to its former glory? Why mimic the Voice of America's blinkered funders on Capitol Hill, anxious to stop broadcasting in Mandarin (of all crucial languages)?

No shrouds here, no barriers to a neat solution. There's the simplest of answers: the merest shift in resources and Whitehall divisions, the slightest pulse of fine minds finally engaged.