The Language Business

Creative Economy

The British Council claims to have a “deep commitment” to the “creative economy”. The attached job ad demonstrates that. Note the creative style of the first paragraph which opens “The British Council, a world leader in cultural relations”. Now compare and contrast that with the second paragraph which opens with “The British Council is a world leader in cultural relations”. Creative or what?

In reality the British Council is a lot more interested in creative accounting than in the creative economy. Because it is given a government licence to move into any sphere of commercial activity that it chooses, normally under diplomatic cover, it is most interested in securing the competitive advantage offered by that licence, and that cover, and of course the massive subsidy provided by the taxpayer in the form of the £200 million grant, the civil service pension arrangements, the diplomatic status abroad and the “charitable” status at home. The government, most especially the FCO but also the many others from the PM down, the Charity Commission and the National Audit Office are just three bodies which collude in this charade.

The reality is that the organisation uses our money to establish a commercial base which makes competition from genuine enterprise – the kind that risks its own money in a competitive environment while carrying tax and overhead obligations etc. - virtually impossible. It makes specious and false claims in Parliament that our money is not used to subsidise its commerce, and the parliamentary committees, like the NAO, adopt the Nelsonian blind eye. In order to get away with this it needs, like Tartuffe, to work on appearances, and so we are treated to this nonsense about “world leadership”. A packet of Smarties to anybody who can tell me one way in which this organisation shows leadership worthy of that term.

And now somebody, a “consummate networker” with "a real ability” will pick up 35K for 1.5 days per week and join those who are prepared to lend their names to supporting this hypocrisy. Give them their due: they’ve worked out that if it helps sustain status quo, the political endorsement, the mythology of “world leadership” and, above all, the public’s cash, it’s cheap at the price.

Interview with Bell Chief Executive

It's not a single subject blog, and I am delighted to post here the interview I recorded this week with David Pottinger, Chief Executive of the Bell Educational Trust. The video lasts 12.5 minutes.

I should add a correction to an observation I made during the interview about Frank Bell's book, published by Elizabeth Bell, "Undercover University". It is available through Amazon but no longer from Elizabeth as there is indeed no stock, and so copies are available only on a limited second hand basis as far as I am now aware. The Amazon link is here.

English in Britain - whenever you need to know

Yes, we pinched the slogan from the Beeb, with thanks. This 1 minute video plugs our English in Britain web site. It's a little unusual for a web site ad not to mention the URL anywhere, but we make the case nonetheless. The disco music is, I think, pretty good.

10 Spring Gardens - a licence to bribe?

 The British Council, a charity, has been awarded a licence to offer inducements to MPs by the Speaker. MPs will no longer have to declare whether the British Council has entertained them, and not even the Information Commissioner can do anything about it. The Speaker has slapped a secrecy order on MPs’ overseas trips, specifically in connection with the British Council.

Here’s the chap that heads up the “British Council Associate Parliamentary Group” beaming out of the British Council’s own pages. He got a First Class ticket to India worth 2K. I bet the hotels weren’t bad either. The Foreign Affairs Committee, the parliamentary body that supposedly scrutinises the British Council, has also been got at: the (last) list of MPs entertained includes a member of that committee, Paul Keetch. Like so many others in positions of privilege, not least in the British Council itself, Mr Keetch apparently has not got to grips with the concept of “conflict of interest”. Will he now gracefully resign from the FAC? What do you think?

Why do British Council “trustees” lend their names to all this corruption? Why does the Committee for Standards in Public Life not answer letters about the British Council? Why does the Charity Commission support the pretence that this is a charity? Why does the OFT not even consider the blatant monopoly powers the organisation enjoys courtesy of the taxpayer, thus eliminating competition? Why does the NAO not answer correspondence about the British Council? Why do the Ombudsman’s powers not extend to reviewing the organisation? Why does the FCO do nothing? Why is even the Information Commissioner barred from investigating the organisation’s parliamentary handouts? What sort of democracy is this?

Britain now has an officially sanctioned, supra-legal channel for sleaze. To its privilege of being able to use public money to undermine enterprise and secure contracts for itself, its privilege of taxpayer subsidy, its privilege of charitable status, the privileges which allow it to operate out of diplomatic premises and avoid prosecution, we can now add the privilege of being licensed to provide off-the-record jollies to those who control its purse strings. The British Council has graduated from parasite to cancer on the body politic.
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Accreditation Alert

 Yes, the marque above is a fraud - but, do you remember ARELS? It was the Association of Recognised English Language Schools, where the word “Recognised” was taken from the old “Ministry of Education” formula, used for all schools which were “recognised as efficient”. Started by a handful of forward-thinking professionals a little over 50 years ago, ARELS flourished until 2004 when it voted itself, and the future of independence for the private sector, out of existence. Is there now a chance of another ARELS?

The British Council is rolling out an accreditation scheme, starting in North Africa. But read the document, and you might start with the section headed "What is the overseas quality assurance scheme?"; it's got global ambitions. True, they avoid using the word “accreditation” and instead have taken the tried and tested word “recognition”, but this old ARELS word means exactly the same thing. Have you spotted the obvious flaw yet? The British Council is evidently setting out to accredit its competitors. Apart from the mind-numbing stupidity of the idea, what are likely to be the consequences?

Here are some that I can think of – please add more in the comments section (anonymously is fine).

1) The accreditation scheme in the UK is hard enough to manage. I recall only about three years ago having to tell the British Council that a school they had listed as accredited for two years – St James Academy in Canterbury – not only did not exist but had in fact never existed except as a proposition and a web site. (Here's an out of date list of "accredited" centres on a Chinese web site and it's listed there as well as on this old British Council green list). How likely is it that they could credibly keep tabs on such a scheme overseas?
2) Since it is unthinkable for the British Council to fail its own accreditation, they are handing themselves yet another instrument with which to prop up their arrogant and incompetent monopoly. This will do no good to anybody.
3) If you are mixing it as a competitor with the British Council, how likely are you to want that organisation to accredit you? How likely are you to want to have them on your premises or to be in any way dependent on them? Is such a scheme not rather more likely to attract, if anybody, the bottom end of the market (which the BC are evidently being encouraged to mix with)?
4) The private sector in the UK have not only wiped out their representation, they have all signed up for the British Council accreditation monopoly. Now they could be faced with the prospect of schools of who knows what quality overseas using a marque which the market will, necessarily and understandably, find indistinguishable from the one they spent years building here. Why go to a British Council accredited school in Britain when you can go to one in Al-Beyda? And why should they not form a new, international ARELS and screw the UK market?

If you are a British organisation with schools overseas, or a British organisation with a school or schools in the UK, I hope you will, in your own interests, knock this arrogant, fatheaded and damaging idea on the head. PDQ.

That British Council closure in Iran

It’s not good news for Britain that a government sponsored service in Iran is closed down. But let’s not assume that this is a totally unreasonable demand by a fanatic regime – there are plenty of other considerations to take into account.

1) Countries overseas repeatedly complain that the British Council’s operation is illegal. It’s not just those spooky Russians or the mad mullah Iranians. There have been objections from plenty of friendly countries in the past including, for example, Spain or Korea. Was there a legal agreement or not? My guess is that, as elsewhere, there was not.
2) The British Council has, as usual, set up a language school in Tehran to make money.[edit: a BC lurker says they did not. As recorded inthe comments below "teaching English" was given as a possible reason for the closure by Channel4 news last night. Apologies if this is misinformation.]  As they did in St Petersburg, as in Seoul, as in Barcelona. Could there not be a pattern here? Why on earth should a state-sponsored organisation be allowed to operate in this way?
3) The British Council’s business is located on diplomatic territory in Tehran, land that is disputed, and which the Iranians would like to reclaim. “The council is located inside a British residential compound in north Tehran that conservatives claim is held illegally and want it to be returned to Iran.” That doesn’t sound like a charity at work.
4) Mr Miliband has said today “The people of Iran do not want to be isolated from the world. So I hope the Iranian government will enable the British Council to resume normal operations as soon as possible.” The people of Iran certainly do not wish to be isolated from the world, and I’m with Mr Miliband there. But when I think of how much happier and better off I, for example, would be without having had contact with the British Council, I tend to side with them. And really, who does he think he is kidding?

I’ve been lucky enough to go to Iran more than once, and this is not in my estimation a country of unreasonable hotheads, and a decision to close a British Council office is hardly an act of aggression. Britain, and Mr Miliband, should spend less time worrying about the interests of this over-privileged, self-serving, and dishonest organisation, and concentrate on matters that matter.

British Council advice to President Obama

The British Council Chief Executive, Martin Davidson, wasted no time in ensuring that the rookie president had the benefit of his experience and advice as he took office. In fact you could say that The British Council’s advice

"If Barack Obama is to live up to the hopes of many at home and abroad of restoring the US's standing on the world stage, he must embrace cultural relations as an invaluable instrument in his foreign policy toolbox”

was, with its use of “he must” only one step short of an order. Still, they say Mr Obama is a good egg, so he will probably take it in good part. But asking him to take advice on building trust from the CEO of this most untrustworthy of organisations does seem to be a rather tall order.  “Cultural relations is not about business” explains the man who heads the organisation that kept open offices against the will of the Russians and is still battling with them in a second high profile tax row, the organisation that is on the record as knowing that it is economical with the truth, that is sponsored by a weapons company, oil companies, and hotel chains and in turn sponsors the well-to-do to create “mutually beneficial relationships”. No, it’s not about business, it’s about people. It’s about “allowing people to explore what they have in common as well as their differences”.  If that doesn’t convince Mr Obama to check his toolbox, surely nothing can (if I may be allowed to say that).

But in case the BC CEO now anticipates an invitation to dinner in the White House, even before he lands his routine cultural relations gong, he should know that he’s seriously out of step with the Americans on the subject of libraries. While the British Council has managed, despite the best efforts of Lord Lloyd-Webber, to ensure another flush of nul points in the next Eurovision through their work of helping to make Britain the most unloved country in Europe as well as in other continents, as it patronises, competes unfairly, dodges tax and closes libraries that people want to stay open, libraries in fact continue to grow in popularity. The photo above, kindly provided by a reader of this blog, shows the window display of the US information centre library in Mbabane, capital of Swaziland, where the BC closed down and pulled out. (And look at those titles: Democracy, The Right to Strike). And today’s Herald reports growth in library usage not only here, but also growth of 65% in the USA.  And we note that the University of Iowa School of Information and Library Science has just won a Laura Bush grant of almost $1 million to train students in digital librarianship.

If cultural relations is about people, libraries could advantageously be nurtured and supported and not just dropped along with the friends (real people) which those libraries, their books, their communities, their educational and recreational value made for Britain, all for the sake of some fatuous and incomprehensible British Council grand plan.

I don’t presume to advise Mr Obama, but if I did it would be to give the British Council a wide berth.