First, tightening budgets forced it to axe HARDTalk. Now, doubts over its future as a tool of Britain’s global “soft power” have thrust BBC World Service into the centre of political debate. The broadcaster’s international news arm has become a story in its own right after a group of powerful Westminster politicians wrote to the UK government urging it to step in as the service was hit with further cuts.
BBC announced last week it was cutting 130 jobs from the World Service to save another £6 million (€7.2 million) from the international division’s squeezed budget of about £400 million. On Friday, a letter to ministers signed by the chairs of three separate House of Commons committees – foreign affairs, culture and the international development committee – said the service desperately needs more funding.
“It must be preserved – if we lose it, we won’t be able to get it back,” said Emily Thornberry, the Labour MP who chairs the foreign affairs committee.
The BBC World Service is viewed by many government and opposition politicians in Westminster as a critical British asset in the global information war, where disinformation is also a growing threat. Russia and China are pumping resources into their own state-funded news arms – often dismissed by their western critics as vehicles of propaganda – the Kremlin-backed RT and China Global Television Network, ultimately controlled by the government in Beijing. Britain fears being left behind.
“Malign actors, both state and non-state, are waging war against the truth,” said Thornberry. “Some countries are aggressively attempting to dominate the global media landscape to further their own interests. The World Service makes an indispensable contribution to the UK’s soft power and global standing.”
Tim Davie, the BBC’s director general, appeared before an unprecedented joint sitting of all three of the Commons committees a week before Christmas, when he warned that the World Service faced an onslaught of “cognitive warfare and fakery” from a “tsunami of bad actors”.
“As a nation we’ve got a public service broadcaster with the most trusted news service in the world. That’s something,” he told MPs. “The trouble is around us – you’re seeing trust ratings for RT and Chinese services grow as they just take over more slots. The threats are overwhelming.”
The World Service, which is mostly a radio operator, broadcasts internationally in 42 languages; BBC insists that, despite the job cuts, it has no plans to cut any language division. Yet in recent years it has been forced to close some radio services in regions of the world that are crucial geopolitical hotpots.
In 2023, for example, it axed BBC Radio Arabic in Lebanon. The letter sent to ministers on Friday by the three committee chairs, including Thornberry, suggested this was an own goal for Britain, as the Arabic service’s radio frequency was taken over by Russia’s Sputnik Radio.
“Listeners tuning in expecting the World Service heard Russian propaganda. There is a pattern of Russian or Chinese state media moving in when the World Service withdraws one of its broadcasting services,” said the letter, which was sent to a junior culture minister, Stephanie Peacock, and a junior minister in the foreign office, Jenny Chapman.
In addition to its core radio output, the service also makes some television programmes, mainly in English – HARDTalk, the long-form interview show in which presenter Stephen Sackur skewers global politicians, was probably the best known.
In the run-up to chancellor Rachel Reeves’s October budget, it was announced that HARDTalk was being axed after almost 30 years, to save cash. The letter sent on Friday was also critical of this decision: “We are concerned that whilst plans to cut HARDTalk are clear, plans for a replacement are less so.”
Reeves announced an extra £37 million for the World Service in her budget, but Davie told MPs at the committee hearing in December that BBC had sought an extra £20 million more than this to shore up its international arm.
The World Service was originally established as the BBC Empire Service in the 1930s, at a time when the British Empire was on the cusp of decline. But it grew in importance as a propaganda tool and purveyor of British values during the second World War, when it was renamed the Overseas Service.
It used to be funded entirely by the UK government but in 2010, it was announced that most of its budget would be siphoned out of the licence fee pot, as David Cameron’s new Tory government unleashed a blizzard of austerity. About two-thirds of its funding now comes from the licence fee, which was frozen for years by the government, with the remaining third coming in direct grants from the foreign office.
Now all sides of Westminster politics appear to agree that tethering the World Service to unstable licence fee income was a mistake. Writing just over a week ago in the Sunday Times, former Tory culture secretary Luzy Frazer said it should revert to direct government funding because it “enhances our standing in the world”.
The letter sent by the committee chairs on Friday had a warning, however. It said that while the BBC World Service could do the British state some service as a tool of “soft power”, it needed safeguards to ensure it was not seen by the rest of the world as just another “voice” of the government.
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