It’s Time to Defund the British Council
Over the last few years I have been keeping a beady eye on the activities of the British Council, which taxpayers were charged £1.2 billion for between 2020-24.
The charity says it “creates friendly knowledge and understanding between the people of the UK and other countries”. It is the perfect example of what Establishment types call ‘soft power’: an institution that apparently reinforces what a great country the UK is and strengthens its global ties. Indeed, British Council employees have even been awarded MBEs “for services to UK Soft Power”.
To read the rest of this article, you need to donate at least £5/month or £50/year to the Daily Sceptic, then create an account on this website. The easiest way to create an account after you’ve made a donation is to click on the ‘Log In’ button on the main menu bar, click ‘Register’ underneath the sign-in box, then create an account, making sure you enter the same email address as the one you used when making a donation. Once you’re logged in, you can then read all our paywalled content, including this article. Being a Donor will also entitle you to comment below the line and access the premium content in the Sceptic, our weekly podcast. A one-off donation of at least £5 will also entitle you to the same benefits for one month. You can donate here.
There are more details about how to create an account, and a number of things you can try if you’re already a donor – and have an account – but cannot access the above perks on our Premium page.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
As ever, let us head straight to the top of the tree and see who’s in charge of this woketastic organization. Brace yourselves, chaps….That’d be CEO: Scott McDonald and the Chair of the Board of Trustees: Dr Paul Thompson. What a shocker! 😮
Tell me: How many times does a claim need to be refuted before it’s declared dead in the water? Asking for a friend… 🙂
https://www.britishcouncil.org/about-us/how-we-are-run
The British Council?
1.5 on Trustpilot
‘Fed up with the British Council’s incompetence, I decided to try the CELPIP exam instead. What a revelation! Not only did I receive my results promptly the very next day, but I also achieved a CLB 9 score, which exceeded my expectations.
The stark contrast between the British Council’s sluggishness and the efficiency of the CELPIP exam was eye-opening. The British Council’s lack of professionalism and disrespect for candidates’ time became abundantly clear when they cited vague reasons for withholding my results and failed to provide any timeline for resolution.
To anyone considering an English proficiency exam, I wholeheartedly recommend opting for the CELPIP exam offered by the Canadian authorities. It was a breath of fresh air compared to the nightmare I endured with the British Council’s IELTS exam.’
Like so many British institutions, it has been living on its past reputation.
The solution? Close it down and start again. It was designed for a different world.
Apropos of not very much but an interesting insight into what makes so many so angry about so much (e.g. the British Council, BBC World Service, BBC Today Programme etc.) in Britain today: ‘With the proliferation of courses on the ‘craft’ of writing, simple originality – in terms of saying something new or different – is regarded as almost irrelevant. In fact, the very idea is often sneered at; certainly its absence seems no impediment. Coincident with this is the ubiquity of the left-liberal outlook, with its complete intolerance of any non-left viewpoint. Although a much-ridiculed term, political correctness has had a devastating effect on the literary culture in Britain. Arguably, the internal self-censorship and deception it has engendered are making literature, at least as previously understood, almost impossible. Certainly the exemplar poetry produced – for example, as seen in Poetry Review – is extraordinarily constipated and insipid…Just try wading through Kate Clanchy, Su Tenderdrake or Henry Shukman though. Good luck! I name names, to avoid the familiar charge of generalising without them. Su Tenderdrake, in particular, is a preposterously overrated figure – an entire 2009 edition of Poetry Review devoted to her ghastly oeuvre, including the ludicrous sequence ‘Mysteries of the Aubergines Sellers’.… Read more »
Come on Reform. Put this in the manifesto.
it might be worth a third that sum if it was supporting the country and not acting as a political campaign. Ditto World Service.
If anyone knows a date funded charity or quango that is not promoting the left, anti-British agenda please let me know.
Excellent Charlotte, nice to see what walls taxpayer cash is being spunked up on, vague thought, the few figures you mentioned, grants, awards appear to add up to trivial amounts, so, guessing most of that 1.2 billion goes in huge salaries, pension contributions and bribes, even more establishment rot….
Everyone of these organisations, whether they be NGOs or Charities, has a Board with CEO, CFO and sundry other titles all pulling in large salaries. In the case of the British Council in the last published accounts for 2023-4, the CEO earned £245-250k with eight other execs earning between £l30-160k, all on Civil Service Pensions.
I read somewhere else the comparison between these organisations, and the ever-shrinking part of the country that actually builds wealth (and remember there are only 3 ways to build real wealth:
you grow stuff
you mine stuff
you make stuff.
Everything else is just pushing it about)
We need to get back to building wealth, not funding these types of activity.
While the things you list are indeed fundamental to have somewhere, I prefer to focus on what human activity is useful as defined by someone being prepared to pay for it with their own money. The British Council largely fails that test.
Reform if elected to govern needs to slash the funding in half immediately to send a message out what’s coming down the line. The following year, slash the funding in half again by this time the message will have got through that the sunny, lucrative career days of the NGO industrial sector are over.
I’ve always thought of the British Council as a ‘soft’ means of spying on other countries.
They probably use it to spy on us now, like the trade union leaders used to.
I worked there on a temporary basis about 10 years ago. Even then it was an insufferably woke, “liberal” and self-satisfied organisation from top to bottom. I doubt it has improved.
I remember having to brace myself to use the staff canteen as a visit there involved queuing next to huge noticeboards and posters full of nonsense notices about BLM, DEI and all the rest.
The main attraction for employees, as far as I could see, was the opportunity for a lot of fully expensed international travel.
‘Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.’
How can you “create friendly knowledge”? Knowledge is knowledge, it can’t be created. And what the he11 is “friendly ” knowledge.
They’re utter stupidity and grift knows no bounds and it is not ” friendly”!
Friendly knowledge is clearly aligned with the ‘correct’ policies and beliefs… not those nasty ideas we don’t talk about
Yes, probably not friendly toward us!