House of Lords Report on UK Soft Power

The House of Lords Committee on Soft Power and the UK’s Influence produced its report Persuasion and Power in Modern World last week.

For readers of this blog there’s not much that’s very surprising about it.  A very short summary would go like this.

Britain is in a world increasingly characterised by hyperconnectivity and ‘the rise of the rest’ and this makes soft and smart power more important. The UK has lots of soft power assets but the government tends to neglect them and shows no ability to coordinate anything. We need stronger mechanisms for defining a national strategic narrative and pointing the great many players in the right direction.

You can get a pretty good sense of what’s in the report (138 pages of text) by looking at the summary on pages 5-7 or even better the conclusions and recommendations on pages 8-21. The report is quite neutral in its tone but many of the conclusions and recommendations are actually fairly critical of the government. They also echo the views of other Parliamentary Committees in the absence of strategy and coordination, the suspicion of the new arrangements for the BBC World Service, the negative impact of visa policies and so on.

Given that I often get the impression that hardly anyone is actually interested in British foreign policy it’s great to see the volume of evidence that the Committee attracted. Hats off the Committee for doing this and to Ben O’Loughlin for his work as the academic advisor.

Incidentally my evidence is here.