The Language Business

More cringe comes creeping out of the Libyan woodwork

The ghastly, creepy letters written to Gaddafi by both Blair and Prince Charles in June 2007 have been published in today’s Times.  Unfortunately we can’t link to The Times these days, but if you are able to get a copy, it’s all there. Just make sure you are not far from a suitable bowl when you read it.

Of course Prince Charles doesn’t do such things off his own bat, and bearing in mind that Gaddafi’s coup on September 1^st 1969 ousted the ruling Senoussi royal family, HRH can’t have expected the military dictator to have been too impressed by his rank. So Blair, whose own efforts are excruciating (“My wife Cherie was pleased to meet Dr Aisha”), put him up to it. But really.  Not only did this flirtation with the master butcher of Libya, the man responsible for the most brutal act of terrorism on British soil, not only did it mean setting aside that monumental evil, alienating the friends and family of Yvonne Fletcher, and watching Blair embrace and fawn around this man in order to get onside, but Blair also dragged in the royal family.

In his letter to His Excellency (Gaddafi), Charles says “I was delighted to see that the work of the British Council, of which I am Vice Patron, is making such an important and positive contribution to teaching in Libya’s universities in partnership with your higher education authorities.”

The contract for the British Council was of course a stitch-up, and presumably too good, too sweet for any other institution but the British Council; the British Council which a few months before had used taxpayers’ money to pay the fees of these “higher education authorities” in their own school in Tripoli, and who almost certainly provided one-to-one instruction for Gaddafi’s daughter Hana also at our expense.  Charles could do well to distance himself from this dreadful organisation, and give his support to genuine enterprise and to organisations, such as our universities, with real expertise.

What, for heaven’s sake, is there to recommend the British involvement in this sordid episode? We use public money to hold up a privileged institution so that it can win further contracts for itself while playing “spot the next dictator” and brown-nosing there with the support of the PM, the heir to the throne and all Establishment players.  And all this at the expense of the taxpayer, at the expense of any pretence of meritocracy, and at the expense of the feelings of the many who suffered in Libya and worldwide at the hands of this man, and at the expense of the principles which we expect our leaders to represent. Yuck.

British Council “a nonsense of an organisation”

Labour MP and Treasury Select Committee member John Mann has called for the British Council to be scrapped referring to it as “a nonsense of an organisation to sustain”. Made during a debate on the economy called by Labour, his message is directed to his party leadership urging them to be specific in where they would make cuts. The British Council’s outreach work should, he said, be undertaken by British universities.

It’s good to hear, at last, that someone in parliament can see what a nonsense the organisation is, and we must hope that Miliband and co listen to his representations, which are otherwise sensible cost-cutting measures on rents, cutting back on multiple redundant layers of government, moving Whitehall departments out of London and so on.  The Conservative led government might do well to listen too.

The idea of British universities taking on the organisation’s outreach work is an interesting one. One item that we might expect to be low on British universities’ agenda would be assisting the Australians in their international student recruitment, as the British Council are attempting to do at this very moment.

How the British Council supports our competitors

Is it because in Britain we know how hopeless the British Council is that the organisation has turned its attention to our competitors? Or is it simply because the organisation is so purely without principle that it will take money for itself from anybody for anything? Today, and for the next three days, the Australian International Education Conference takes place in Adelaide. At this event two of the British Council’s “Education Intelligence” section will be presenting their “Students in Motion” report series.  

“They'll look specifically at the forecasting of Chinese and Malaysian student mobility to Australia and will examine the factors which influence this student flow.”

Now I accept that people from one country can present in another and look at broad issues analytically and academically. But I ask myself this: if we were able to congregate a representative group of British taxpayers, and put a proposal to them that they should pay for a team of people to undertake Australia specific research and then to go to Australia and assist them in their competition for international students, how many hands do you think would vote in favour? More bluntly, WTF does the British Council think it is doing investing so much in reports about recruitment to the US from China, to Australia from Malaysia, to Canada from India etc. ? 

It would be nice to think that the deeply incompetent British Council was going to Australia as our secret weapon in the hope they would make the same hash of things there as they have here, but of course the Aussies are not so stupid, and in any case the point here is one of the British Council’s intent. Mostly it is the usual “Aren’t I clever” stuff – “Education Intelligence has developed a new model capable of delivering annual predictions of student demand for education with a high degree of robustness” such as the BC have been doing for years. And note the carefully chosen word “robustness”; clearly the word “accuracy” was too scary, and would make them a hostage to fortune. The nonsense these people produce can no doubt be claimed to be “robust” at the time the predictions were made, however inaccurate they turned out to be subsequently when the “new model” becomes old and gets pushed under the carpet with the rest of the organisation’s detritus.

The head of the British Council division responsible for this treachery (we pay these people to support our institutions not our competitors’) is one Anne Wozencraft (PhD) who is no stranger to bending the rules. In September 2001 the British Council signed an agreement with Education Websites Ltd which included a profit-sharing agreement; Ms Wozencraft signed on behalf of the British Council while the other signatory was our present Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt. What’s wrong with that? Ms Wozencraft’s job title at the time was Director, Grant Funded Services (UK) – in other words being grant-funded she was officially on the other side of the British Council’s “Chinese Wall”, once described by Lord Kinnock as “impenetrable”, and should have had no part in the organisation’s “profit-making” activities. But what the hell? Nobody watches these things, and nobody does anything about it, and the fundamental lack of integrity in the arrangements is a mere detail.

And now what? You would struggle to find even a mention of the UK in this division’s work or their brief. Of course forecasting Malaysian business in Canada or whatever is going to be a lot more fun than concentrating on Britain. But why should we pay for this? Cannot the Canadians, the Americans or Australians do this for themselves? These mighty countries need the British Council like the proverbial hole in the head. The British Council has cocked up the promotion of UK Education bigtime, and the contract with Ms Wozencraft’s signature on it is a classic example of their arrogant incompetence. That agreement led to the Education UK website, once trumpeted, or should we say once forecast (by the BC), as about to provide a “major boost” to student numbers in the UK. Millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money later, the site is seen by everybody as being hopeless, but the BC can’t lose face and so continues to direct people to it, thereby giving further assistance to our competitors. And I haven’t even mentioned the tumbling status of British Council accreditation of the ELT sector in which so many have invested so much, or the organisation’s silent acquiescence in the face of the ravages of the sector by government decrees concerning visa arrangements and the exhorbitant costs (and irrelevance) of the new “Educational Oversight” . The organisation’s negative value to the taxpayer is a bloody outrage.