Cultural Diplomacy, 13 March 2007

I am grateful for being allowed to speak, particularly as I arrived late; my apologies for that. I should like to make a few remarks to follow the excellent contributions that I came here to hear.I agree with everything that has been said about the importance of soft power, which will become more and more important; I agree with the hon. Member for Mid-Sussex (Mr. Soames) very much on that. I pay tribute to all the institutions to which the hon. Gentleman and my hon. Friend the Member for Sittingbourne and Sheppey (Derek Wyatt) also paid tribute, such as the BBC and the British Council. They are wonderful and precious British institutions that we need to cherish and continue to fund adequately.I have not heard so far about how we project soft power. The traditional view is that we exercise it through institutions, such as the British Council and the BBC World Service, that are focused specifically on projecting overseas. However, in the modern world we also have to consider what we do here. It would be a mistake if we thought that our great universities and cultural institutions—our theatres, museums and so on—had to project their presences overseas to be able to project soft power. What is important is that people will focus on what happens in this country much more than they ever used to. We do not necessarily only need the British Council, with its offices overseas, to make people see what we can contribute as a nation and to enhance our status in the world, which, as many much more distinguished contributors than I have said, is increasingly important in the whole business of diplomacy.It is important that in this country we fund our great universities adequately and bring students here. We do not have to work that hard to enshrine English as a global language; it is already that. We need to enshrine excellence in this country. That must be the foundation. I am sure that shortly my hon. Friend the Minister will talk about funding; I hope that he will bear it in mind that there is a seamless web between what we do with our great cultural institutions in this country—they are world class and we need to keep them so—and what we do in projecting soft power overseas.

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