Ten years of British Council rubbish

Today we mark the tenth anniversary of the launch of the British Council "Education UK" website, and lament not just its failure but the damage caused to institutions, especially in the United Kingdom, by its particular brand of taxpayer-sponsored aggressive incompetence. For all of those ten years, and a bit longer, the project has been the property of the British Council but licensed to the company of Jeremy Hunt, the Culture Secretary. And who is now, worryingly, in charge of the Olympic Games.

This particular fiasco has its roots in the “Prime Minister’s Initiative” – the occasion when Tony Blair put up public money to support international student recruitment. The initiative was then put in the hands of the British Council, and thus condemned at birth. Years later, while the “PMI” was allegedly still alive, we were treated to the craven Gordon Brown actually bragging that he was reducing student numbers, and today… well, we hardly need to go into that again.

Such initiatives are simply platforms for the British Council to preen itself publicly and make inflated claims; this “PMI” at one time had the British Council claiming, in Parliament as well as in public reports, that they were recruiting a million students per year.  Today, when institutions could use some political support from the organisation that has made so much money out of them, those absurd claims have melted away and support there is none.

Yes, of course I have an interest to declare. But one reason that I must point these things out is that the institutions who suffer most from the British Council are ones which depend on the organisation for accreditation and, to some extent, for international representation, and keep their heads down.  And their association is stuck with them anyway. For all our sakes, the British Council should be dismantled, and their wretched “Education UK” website would be a good place to start.

Comments

[Robert]

And as we are celebrating this anniversary we receive a timely report on the latest example of BC nonsense http://www.google.com/hostednews/ukpress/article/ALeqM5i9kURRPK__piGshSp4auKO2SKI9w?docId=N0798011325732747640A

The spokesperson for the BC bleated: "It's completely wrong to describe all of this expenditure as taxpayers' money. Less than a third of our income comes from our Government grant. We earn the rest ourselves through our business activities such as teaching English and delivering development contracts, and all our work benefits the UK.' What they neglected to mention was that the BC earns this income at the expense of UK companies by presenting its commercial contracts business (in Martin Davidson's words) as 'an integral part of our cultural relations programme'. And so it is that the GBP200m that the BC receives from the public purse each year, plus support from the taxpayer funded FCO, combine to position the BC unfairly to win contracts and to continue the type of lavish lifestyles enjoyed by its legion of pompous and ineffective ex teachers who describe themselves as diplomats. By all means let's have a cultural attache in every embassy, but for goodness sake let us dismantle this inefficient and dishonest 'business' which flies in the face of British business interests and any notion of fairness.

[Peter]

Robert, It's even worse than that. The BC spokesperson says: "
We earn the rest ourselves through our business activities such as teaching English and delivering development contracts". But development contracts are funded by either DFID (which is funded by the UK taxpayer) or by the EC (which is funded by the UK and EU taxpayers). The BC spokesperson does not seem to understand it. They also don't seem to understand that development contracts are supposed to benefit the countries that the projects are in, not the UK.