Why it's time to abolish the British Council, an out-dated colonial throwback

When the UK has famous people like Dua Lipa helping to promote its image abroad, it doesn't need the British Council (Picture: Justin Tallis) | AFP via Getty Images

There is some corner of a foreign field that is forever England. Or rather there would be if the British Council got their way.

Founded nearly a century ago to promote the UK overseas, this bastion of Britishness is facing hard times. The chief executive is considering £250 million in budget cuts, losing hundreds of staff and axing offices in more than 40 countries, unless the government steps in to save the day.

Despite the frantic lobbying going on by the British Council to champion the so-called soft power they promote overseas, this seems like a good moment to do a little cost-benefit analysis.

My initial experience of the British Council was seeing nice-but-dim posh kids leave university and go off to teach English for them abroad. Years later, I visited an outpost of the British Council in a small African country which consisted of a dusty library filled with Shakespeare and classic English texts presided over by a spectacularly officious expat.

When the UK has famous people like Dua Lipa helping to promote its image abroad, it doesn't need the British Council (Picture: Justin Tallis) | AFP via Getty Images

£200m art collection

The British Council warns it could disappear within a decade unless drastic funding changes are made. But with a £200m art collection featuring 8,500 works by artists including Lucien Freud and David Hockney, it doesn’t look like an organisation tottering on the edge. Current job vacancies include a young learners coordinator in Myanmar, a head of empowerment in education in Bangladesh and an English exam invigilator in Tunisia.

Then there is the role the British Council has played in undermining UK manufacturing. In sectors like jewellery, funding was available for firms to teach design and production in countries like India. Guess where much of the manufacturing now takes place?

The roots of the financial crisis facing the British Council lie in a £200m Covid-era loan obtained from the UK Government. They want the loan written off or at least changed to more reasonable terms, but why should they receive special treatment over all the businesses struggling in the current climate?

Instead this is a good opportunity to take a good hard look at the British Council. Its stated aims may have been laudable a century ago but the world has changed. At a time when we are reassessing colonialism, the organisation feels like a feeble leftover from the days of imperialism when Britain knew best.

Potter, Bond, Who, Knightley

Nowadays, we don’t need the British Council to promote the UK abroad. We have Harry Potter, James Bond, Dr Who, Dua Lipa, Jamie Oliver, Ian Rankin, James Dyson and Keira Knightley doing just that. Young people learn English from social media and watching reruns of Friends, not from conjugating verbs in a classroom in the back streets of Bilbao, coincidentally where they are also advertising a current vacancy.

At a time when Chinese and Russian influence is growing around the world, Britain does have to promote itself overseas but that happens on a daily basis anyway thanks to the dominance of the English language and the appetite for the music, film and literature we produce. But we only deserve that position if we continue to come up with the goods.

The British Council is an anachronism, an expensive and increasingly irrelevant throwback to a time when as the architect of Empire, Cecil Rhodes, put it, to be born English is to “have won the lottery of life”. Those days are gone.