The Language Business

British Council answers the Irish Question

This picture was taken outside the British Council office in Dublin recently, and shows two British Council employees and some of their supporters manning a picket line.

At a moment in history when Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness can chuckle together over a cup of tea, and Bertie Ahern can address the joint Houses of Parliament, is it not just a little disappointing that Britain’s representative “cultural relations” specialists, the organisation paid for by the British taxpayer to oil the wheels of diplomacy, can’t apparently do a better job with our nearest neighbour? Or even with its own employees?

The organisation that claims to have enabled 20 million people to discuss their shared future, has evidently had a little trouble in reaching two, just two, of its own employees. As the British Council restructures itself in Ireland, these women were deemed expendable, and were given the statutory minimum redundancy pay. As the British Council is now recruiting four “executive directors” on six figure salaries plus perks, perhaps the organisation needs a bit more slush in the salary barrel.

My spies tell me that the gent in the middle is a friend of the present British Council Chair, while the lady on his immediate left is a friend of the last one.

Tsk, tsk.

From the Ministry of Truth

Further to our comments on the British Council Board Directors' application form, it's interesting to compare and contrast how the award of the Principe de Asturias prize was announced by other winners.

Here, for example, is what the Goethe Institut reports on its web site:

The Spanish Fundación Príncipe de Asturias today announced that the Goethe-Institut together with the British Council, the Spanish Instituto Cervantes, the Italian Società Dante Alighieri, the Alliance Française and the Portugese Instituto Camões have been awarded this year’s Prince of Asturias prize for communication and the humanities.

And here is how it is reported by the Alliance Francaise:

Gathered in Oviedo the jury of the Príncipe de Asturias Award in Comunications and Humanities 2005…agreed to bestow the Príncipe de Asturias Award in Comunications and Humanities on the joint nomination of Europe´s major cultural institutes, listed as follows in order of seniority : : Alliance Française (France), Società "Dante Alighieri" (Italy), British Council (UK), Goethe Institut (Germany), Instituto Cervantes (Spain) and Instituto Camões (Portugal).

But on their site the pricks at the British Council report it thus:

We have recently been awarded Communications and Humanity 2005 prize by the prestigious Príncipe de Asturias Foundation, in acknowledgement of our international work in communications and humanitarianism. The award will be received at a ceremony in Oviedo, in October.

And as our correspondent Arthur has pointed out, the issue here is not just that the British Council puts itself centre stage, listing itself and playing down the fact that it was a joint prize for a joint candidacy, but also its cynical distortion of the basis of the award. It was not for the British Council's "international work in communications and humanitarianism". It was, as the French and Germans point out, a joint nomination for communication and the humanities.

What the jury actually said was that the prize was

"in recognition of their contribution to the common task of preserving and distributing Europe’s cultural heritage through the teaching of their respective national languages in every continent and to millions of people, as well as their literary and artistic traditions and the ethical and humanistic values which constitute the bedrock of Western Civilisation."

So, there we are. It was not for the British Council, it was not for its or anybody else's humanitarianism, but it was in fact a joint prize for six organisations' language teaching and their support for the humanities. One assumes they know the difference.

For further evidence of the distortions from our own Ministry of Truth, read both of Arthur's comments in full.

Applying for one of those Director posts?

A correspondent sent me a link to the recruitment information for one of these British Council “Executive Director” posts and - for this dinosaur at least - it’s been something of an eye-opener.

There is the usual hyperbole and self-congratulation. “We now enable more than 20 million people both in the UK and in 109 countries and territories worldwide to experience the UK’s creativity and to discuss issues that affect a shared global future”. Such pretentious nonsense is at least a way of telling potential applicants what the British Council game is about, and my tip to candidates is to join in that game at interview. For example, where in the information pack it records that “we were awarded Communications and Humanity 2005 prize by the prestigious Principe de Asturias Foundation in acknowledgement of their international work in communications and humanitarianism” (that should presumably be “our international work”), it is not good etiquette to point out that the award was not just for the British Council but that it was shared with Alliance Française, Società Dante Alighieri, Goethe-Institut, Instituto Cervantes and Instituto Camões, and that to leave the British Council off such a list would presumably have been a Eurogaffe. (Perhaps it was “their international work” after all).

The British Council element of the prize was on that occasion collected personally by the Director-General, and I understand that he found time to include a day’s painting on that trip too – sharing the UK’s creativity.

But it’s the personal stuff that intrigues me and, as a dinosaur, the question I stared at longest was the one about ethnic origin. It seems the applicants are likely to be White, Mixed, Asian, Black, Chinese or any other Background, and its true that the last category sews it up. Here’s a bit that I thought was topical – British, English, Scottish, Welsh, Other, then Irish and Other white background. Now we know that Gordon Brown would choose British, and that Alex Salmond would choose Scottish, Rhodri Morgan would choose Welsh, Margaret Hodge English, Martin McGuinness Irish and Ian Paisley would – perhaps with a touch of disgruntlement - choose Other. And I guess Lembit Opik would go for Other white background. But why these questions, and when will we grow up?

The form makes provision for Chinese Welsh, Asian Scottish, and many other combos (but no Black Irish for example) and a catch-all any other mixed background (but you have to specify). Why not simply require DNA testing, and get a detailed profile of ethnicity going back 100s of years and put the issues beyond doubt? The results might be a revelation to the nationalists as well as to the apparently ethno-fixated British Council.

There’s religion of course (a bit hairy that one given the British Council’s recent religionist stance). Then there’s sex (two options only), and sexual orientation with three options: opposite, same or both, with opposite (a.k.a. Heterosexual) on the second line after Bisexual and Gay or Lesbian; I guess that’s alphabetical order rather than order of likelihood; and you can’t really squeeze Heterosexual between Gay and Lesbian without making a new and, er, discriminatory sexual orientation category. (Do they get separate canteens or what?)

The British Council say that all this personal information "will not be seen by those making the selection decision". Here’s my tip: ask them who will see it, what will be done with it, and how you can be sure that your personal information goes no further.

And then decide whether you trust them.

This "World Authority" Malarkey

From the Sunday Times ad for four “Executive Board” directors of the British Council, we can infer how the British Council will be seeking to justify its continued existence. Setting aside the “high-performing”, “highly relevant”, “successful delivery”, “effective global operating platform” bollocks, what the subtext says is that it is out to make as much money as possible through language schools, exams, exhibitions, promotions, publications etc., and in order to ensure that it can make a case for the taxpayers’ subsidy that makes these money-making wheezes possible, it has to give the impression that it has some sort of expertise or “authority”. So just as it is now a self-appointed “world leader in cultural relations” (seriously, have you ever met such an animal in the British Council or anywhere else?), it shall in future be “acknowledged as a world authority in international education, the arts and English language teaching”.

Pause. Ask yourself what a “world authority in the arts” could be. Perhaps the benighted foreign wallahs will, realising the relative poverty of their own cultures, turn to the big white chiefs at the BC for lessons in landscape painting or how to dance on flags.  Or is that being unfair? Is it do you suppose more likely that the British Council will in due course be outranking dedicated arts organisations and seats of learning in Britain and worldwide with their unique experience and incisive authority? Should The Smithsonian, for example, be looking to its laurels? Pull the other one. Then there’s international education. What exactly is meant by that phrase, who delivers it, where does such expertise reside, and what would a “world authority in international education” actually be? Ach.

And of course there is “English language teaching”. The British Council perhaps believes it is on safer ground here, but it is not. The British Council operates a number of subsidised language schools around the world, and that’s pretty much it. While others come and go, the delightful Caroline Moore poles along to IATEFL events and such, and the equally delightful Liz McLaren holds the accreditation fort in Manchester, but both these women would have the good sense to acknowledge that this does not confer world authority status either on them or the organisation they work for. John Whitehead was recently ELT Director, but has now become Director Wales where penetration of English language has already been accomplished with some success without recorded input from the British Council, so there’s no transfer of expertise there. In what fora do denizens of the British Council demonstrate their world authority, in what publications, in which universities and departments, who or what are they talking about? It used to have links of a sort with the many-faceted world of English language teaching through ETAC, the English Teaching Advisory Committee, but nowadays it doesn’t even have that. In ELT, as in the arts or international education, or any other sphere, the king is in the altogether.

Parliament records this:

Sir David Green told us that the strategic priorities where the British Council could make the biggest difference were, "making the world safer from global terrorism; preventing and resolving conflicts with a very strong international system; supporting the UK economy; and achieving climate change."

Whether it is at a given moment posturing as a “world authority” on ELT etc., or whether it is at another moment making laughable claims about its global role (“achieving climate change”? British Council solar wind too?), the reality is that the British Council is a parasite on the UK economy, devoid of purpose or expertise. It does nothing which is not or could not be done better by professional organisations. It has simply got out of control, hooked on government subsidy, privilege and its own rhetoric while sucking the blood out of genuine enterprise and creativity. The FCO is either too inert or too stupid to do anything about it, the independent trustees have been written out of the script, its charitable status is a tax fiddle and not worth a mention, and in its latest incarnation it is apparently going to play business games at our expense via a new “executive board”. The organisation has achieved the nirvana of having a gold-plated international doddle at public expense unencumbered by any coherent defining aims or accountability. Look no further than this preposterous ad.

British Council Trustees Redundant - Official

Today’s Sunday Times carries a giant ad for four directors of a new British Council “executive board”. These posts are Director Programmes, Director Business Development, Director Resources, Director Strategy and External Relations.

The ad mentions building the “brand”, “global business innovation”, “high return on investment”, “risk management” (a joke this, surely), “corporate strategy” and other bizspeak buzzwords. “This role will drive accountability and short-term delivery through the effective management of the organisation’s portfolio of regional and country-based products and services…” etc. Oh dear. This, dear reader, is the British Council.

NO MENTION of The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (which “sponsors” the organisation).

NO MENTION of The Public Diplomacy Board (which – supposedly anyway - sets its strategy)

NO MENTION of the Taxpayer who is lumbered with giant subsidies for the organisation and the consequent need for public accountability

NO MENTION of the fact that this is a CHARITY with HM The Queen as Patron and HRH The Prince of Wales as Vice Patron

NO MENTION of The Board of Trustees.

As we have pointed out before, the British Council gets strategic direction from the Public Diplomacy Board (its FCO paymasters), and says more publicly that it gets strategic direction from the board of trustees – which is not possible of course. Now we have an “executive board” with the word “strategy” written all over the job descriptions. The board of trustees were in other words already redundant, and now even the figleaf covering their non-role has been removed.

The ad promises “attractive salaries and benefits”. You bet. A hugely subsidised business with a global unfair competition licence, with a tradition of promoting the incompetent, which is unaccountable, generously funded, with unmatchable job security, which has Establishment backing, tax privileges, provides the opportunity to back your favourite hobbies (and even your own companies), first class travel and sub worldwide, and all that while reporting to a CEO who can’t even answer emails.

Everybody should apply.

More on Oil, Politics and the British Council

NB. If you have come in via the mighty Iain Dale blog, he is referring to the original "Oil, Politics and the British Council" blog below. This latest, closely related, blog is written by Ian Pennington, who has been researching this issue from Libya - and is now back in the UK. Note particularly Ian's point about the British Council's code of conduct - and don't miss "Arthur"'s comment at the end. Ian writes:

An excellent blog which, quite rightly, concentrates on just one, very important, area of this whole, messy freebies for the well connected/relationship building issue.

I thought your readers might be interested in how difficult it has actually been to get this information from the 'transparent and accountable' British Council.

My original enquiry was made back in January. Had I not known that the British Council's original response was incomplete I would have had to accept what they told me. I was, however, aware that the British Council had sponsored a young learner and it was clear that this student did not fit into any of the categories given in their original response. I told the British Council that the information given was incomplete but they continued to insist it was correct. It wasn't until I told them which class to look at that they finally admitted their error and provided the information you have used in this blog. What sort of organisation is it that requires you to know the answer before you ask the question?

I have to ask myself whether the failure to provide this information was a genuine mistake or whether it was intentional.

You have picked up on serious ethical issues that could - indeed, should - cause the British Council severe embarrassment. Yet there are still further issues surrounding this provision of free courses to, amongst others, the child of a high ranking official. It is very difficult for a foreign organisation to get the necessary permission to provide education services in Libya and, given that the country is well known for corruption, one cannot but question why these particular sponsorships have taken place, especially when the British Council's own "Code of Conduct" is consulted. Paragraph 10 states: "In conducting its business the British Council will not seek advantage by giving or receiving any improper gifts, entertainment or payments. You must be sure that your own conduct would be justifiable under the scrutiny of the press, the public or competitors and would withstand examination by those to whom you are accountable. ... You must not therefore give to , or accept from, any British Council contact any gift or service, in cash or kind, which has commercial value and could be viewed as an inducement or a reward for business." and "In the British Council's dealings with commercial contacts and public officials you are expected to act with honesty and integrity. You must avoid offering or giving them inducements, tips or similar payments."

Enough said.

I am still awaiting further clarification on my enquiry because the response so far provided has proved to be inaccurate, vague and slow. Watch this space...

Oil, Politics and the British Council

Regular readers will know that we reported recently on the fact that “grant-in-aid” (i.e. taxpayers’) money was being used by the British Council to sponsor students at its language school in Tripoli. Apart from the fact that the British Council claims to “earn” money through its schools, and claims too that there is no overlap of any kind between their “earned” money and the money gifted to it as a subsidy by the taxpayer, and apart from the fact that use of public money for such a purpose is completely out of order, our researcher in Tripoli also exposed an ethical issue concerning the recipients of this British largesse. The sponsored students were not the poor and needy, neither had they demonstrated scholastic aptitude, but rather they were identified by our “cultural relations experts” as being well connected for “relationship building”.

Subsequent to our last piece on this issue, the British Council was pressed concerning the status of one particular sponsored student who had been initially described as a National Oil Company staff member. This is the wriggle that came back:

I have checked back on the information we originally provided for you and discovered – I can only apologise – that whereas we correctly listed him as one of our sponsored students, we erroneously described him as a NOC ‘staff member’. [name given] is perfectly right to point out that he is too young to be a staff member. Student X is actually less directly connected with NOC but was categorised in this way because the relationships involved are quite complex and it would be impossible for registration staff to summarise them in one line on our records.

So, not a staff member because he is in fact too young, and is “less directly connected” with the National Oil Company, while the relationship is clearly “complex”. What could that really mean? Here is the answer:

Student X is the son of one of the British Council’s most important contacts in Libya - the [title given] of the Gaddafi Development Foundation and one of the right-hand men of [name given], the possible future leader of Libya. The Foundation is highly influential in change programmes across all sectors, including the energy sector and engendering positive relations with their top decision-makers is therefore very useful to us in furthering our objective to assist Libya in oil sector reform. The on-the-spot justification for the sponsorship was therefore that it would help us pursue our capacity building work in the oil sector and BC registration staff pragmatically summarised all of this as ‘NOC’ on our records.

Right. So sponsored Student X turns out to be the son of a right hand man of the “possible future leader of Libya”, but is “pragmatically summarised” as being an employee of the National Oil Company - which he has nothing to do with - when it comes to explaining why we are paying for him.

Col. Gaddafi seized power on September 1st 1969 and, after Castro, has probably been in charge of his country longer than any other leader. We recognise pragmatically that he’s in charge. He is no doubt more popular than some dictators, and quite possibly more popular than some of our own elected politicians. But we can’t actually know any of that because there’s an absence of opposition and no test at the ballot box. There is, in other words, no democracy, and – in respect of a number of very serious incidents - relations between our two countries have been severely tested, and a certain distance is surely indicated. And whether you sign up for the reasons our politicians gave for going to war in Iraq, or for the reasons they give us now for that catastrophe, or the battles in Afghanistan, the linking theme is democracy (just ask the Americans). British organisations, especially those which claim (however undemocratically) to be representative, should not, we submit, be playing “spot the next dictator” and then use British taxpayer-funded “sponsorships” to ingratiate themselves with what they believe might be the next undemocratic regime of this or any other country.

This is how the British Council concludes this communication:

As long as modest numbers of English course sponsorships continue to help us meet our principal objective of generating mutual understanding and respect between Libya and the UK, it makes perfect sense to continue with the practice.

If our self-appointed cultural relations experts really think that free places for the well-connected will buy “mutual understanding and respect between Libya and the UK”, then heaven help us all. Does anybody else believe that? What this practice does is show how sleazy the British Council – a registered charity for goodness sake - has become, how it cares nothing for principle or for the integrity of its financial management, and how it just pushes ahead with its own myopic and tacky agenda. It’s a disgrace. A bloody disgrace.

New Release from British Council

An Irish Insider writes:

I didn't know about the Council's survey on walking, but it explains something that was puzzling me. You may be aware that they have decided to effectively end their work here in Dublin. They had three employees (excluding their esteemed director) after my departure. One of the employees has accepted their redundancy offer and the other two were given compulsory redundancy notices (Irish Times, 4th April). And then there were none. (Don't mention Little Green Boxes or Little Green Bottles!)

This, of course, is just part of their wider European Strategy which has been put together by the best minds in the Council after years of really hard thinking. It's just a typo (Jenny's fault, again) that it was left out of their S2010. Anyway, they're going to concentrate on North-South relations as part of their all-Europe strategy. Can you get that? I didn't think you would. I was wondering why they couldn't keep their two remaining employees, who are known and respected by the Council's target audience, instead of firing them and hiring a sort of mini-director who, with an assistant dogsbody, will report to a real director in Belfast.

A lot of people are confused by all of this. Some are saying that since Belfast is a UK office that, by making Dublin subservient to Belfast, they are reintegrating us into the UK. After the UK's experience of the Northern part of the island, I don't think that many UK people would be too happy with this. The natives down here certainly wouldn't be. Other people are wondering what exactly a British Council in Dublin taking direction from a British Council office in Belfast which takes its orders from London has to contribute to North-South relations.

Variations of it were tried for almost eight hundred years and it was a constant irritation to everyone on both sides, though everyone agrees that of all the bodies tasked with imbuing us Irish with a sense of British Values and Culture (whatever they are), the Council has been the most benign and harmless. The worst it has done - up to this point - is to bore people.

I was worried about the effect it was going to have on North-South relations, because the way it has handled the current situation with its staff is redolent of old colonial times, as it has shown either a complete misunderstanding of, or an arrogant disrespect for, the way in which Industrial Relations are handled in Ireland. I am not worried now. And I know why the current employees would not be able to take on the jobs of mini-director and his/her dogsbody. They have no experience of walking surveys. The Council, in its sagacity and devilish cleverness, has spotted a niche in the over crowded area of North-South relations. No one is doing walking surveys.

Tom Farrell

Keeping up with the British Council

How fast do you walk over a distance of 60 feet? That’s not a frivolous question. Indeed it matters enough for the great British taxpayer to have financed international research on precisely that question. Evidently unwitting members of the general public were secretly timed by specially trained operatives with stopwatches, presumably concealed in pockets or burqas so as not to cause any distortions in the results, walking over that distance (18 metres) in 32 cities all over the world.

Guess what? People, or at any rate some people, walk faster in Copenhagen (capital of Denmark) than they do in Blantyre (second city in Malawi). The research, reportedly conducted by the British Council, concludes that people’s walking speed is a reliable measure of the pace of life in a city. They also conclude that people are walking about 10% faster now than in the early 1990s when a similar study was last conducted.

The article does not say whether there yet exists a reliable measure of the pace of life in the British Council. We do know that the National Audit Office is conducting a “value for money” study of the British Council this year, but it is not known whether the NAO methodology involves timing employees over 18 metres in any representative group of countries, or whether there is any way of establishing whether the organisation is 10% more or less absurd now than it was in the 1990s.