British Cultural Soft Power on Parade

The Yellow Submarine at John Lennon Liverpool Airport, Bryan Ledgard, 2006. CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Foreign Secretary David Lammy and Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport Lisa Nandy, kickstarted 2025 by holding a joint event to launch the newly convened 26-member Soft Power Council at Lancaster House. The event was described online as "swanky" by Lord Vaizey of Didcot, the former Tory Minister of State for Culture and the Digital Economy - or Ed as he’s more commonly known. Initially, I misconstrued Ed’s description for a much more vulgar expression, but this was probably due to the fact that Graham Norton's innuendo-laced commentary for the Eurovision Song Contest - the world’s most fabulous soft power extravaganza - has been imprinted on my more-than-susceptible queer mind over time. 

Risqué misreading aside, the Soft Power Council did genuinely sound so cutesy and cuddly that I initially suspected a group with the same name of appearing in an episode of the late 1990s high camp Cartoon Network animated television series The Powerpuff Girls. I checked, and it hadn't.

This event wasn’t like the Conservative government's basement party booze-ups at 10 Downing Street in the past, when plonk served from a suitcase soiled the carpets; instead, it was a much more classy affair and part of the Labour government's Plan for Change. This plan is much more than just preventing a repeat of Partygate; the Prime Minister's Office describes it as “part of a decade of national renewal, built on the foundations of a stable economy, secure borders and national security.” This includes the use of arts, culture and heritage in soft power.

According to the British Academy, one of its fellows, American political scientist Joseph Nye, defined the term ‘soft power’ in the late 1980s to mean “the ability to influence the behaviour of others and obtain desired outcomes through attraction and co-option”. By using soft power to "reimagine Britain's role on the world stage, reinvigorate alliances and forge new partnerships," Lammy said, the Soft Power Council should help obtain the Plan for Change’s desired outcomes.

Britain's international standing would undoubtedly benefit from the egg on its face left by Brexit - the type of egg that’s now most likely subject to stringent EU-UK border checks - being wiped away, as well as an overall zhuzh up. But, are Lammy and Nandy viewing Britain's cultural soft power status through rose-tinted glasses, the mass-produced rose-tinted glasses that were all the rage during the peak of Britpop in the late 1990s, when the UK was dubbed Cool Britannia and was riding high on the cultural soft power charts, and Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair was whooping it up with the likes of Oasis frontman Noel Gallagher?

Even if it were possible, would we want the Soft Power Council to try to replicate the Blairite blueprint for culture? Probably not in its entirety. In their 2017 Guardian article, ‘Cool Britannia symbolised hope – but all it delivered was a culture of inequality’, Tom Campbell and Homa Khaleeli stated that “Tony Blair reshaped Britain’s economy around the arts, yet the project’s legacy is an exploitative sector dominated by people from an astonishingly small demographic pool”. Then again, it's possible that replication is already underway; Oasis has reformed, tinted glasses are back in style and the cultural sector continues to struggle with being patently unrepresentative of UK society as a whole.

Without addressing these entrenched inequalities in the cultural sector and wider society in the UK, how realistic is it to "reimagine Britain's role on the world stage" as wholly positive? While Lammy was still shadow foreign secretary, Nesrine Malik questioned his pursuit of "optimism" in his proposed foreign policy approach in her 2024 Guardian article (other newspapers are available), ‘Ravaged by austerity, chastened by Brexit: how can Britain have influence abroad when it’s broken at home?’ She quite rightly pointed out that in an effort to give Britain a global glow-up, representatives of the UK can’t possibly “face the world with any sense of swagger” unless there’s been a “reckoning with what it has become at home.”

The instability and insecurity in many areas of the cultural sector would undoubtedly need to be included in any sort of reckoning. A Campaign for the Arts analysis released at the end of 2024 revealed the startling reality that local authorities in England have reduced their spending on culture per person by more than 50% since 2009-10. Campaign for the Arts' Director, Jack Gamble, acknowledged that “Each cut poses a further risk to cultural opportunities, hitting underserved communities the hardest.” Around the same time, the severity of Wales' culture spending cuts caused National Theatre Wales to reconfigure itself as Team, a community-driven arts and culture organisation, after losing 100% of Arts Council of Wales funding. This compelled Welsh acting sensation and activist Michael Sheen to "reimagine the way forward" and, at least initially, spend his own money to establish the Welsh National Theatre.

There’s only one Michael Sheen, and it’s unrealistic to expect him to step in every time a cultural organisation in the UK faces uncertainty. However, the type of reimagining that both Sheen and Lammy encourage is something that we’re all more than capable of. 

Just days before the launch of the Soft Power Council, Secretary of State for Defence John Healey announced a £9 billion Plan for Change contract with Rolls-Royce to supply nuclear reactors for the Royal Navy's hard power fleet of Vanguard-Class submarines. What if we imagined a significant chunk of that money being reallocated to beef up the government's £270 million Arts Everywhere Fund as well as other cultural funding? The British Council, the vanguard of UK cultural and educational soft power, could undoubtedly use it. Its CEO, Scott McDonald, stated that one of the drastic steps being considered to service the commercial interest rates paid on a £200 million government loan taken out during the pandemic is the sale of part of its 10,000-strong art collection.

I’m not calling for unilateral disarmament in the UK; rather, I'm highlighting the reality that we have choices about how we spend our money and what kind of nation we become as a result. For instance, it’ll be difficult to remove the stubborn Florida orange stain that’s been deposited on the UK's image since the dumbfounding decision to cut foreign aid in favour of increased defence expenditure. 

The Foreign Affairs Committee inquiry, 'Soft power: a strategy for UK success?' will explore the different options for soft power while also scrutinising "the work of the Government's new Soft Power Council and any subsequent strategy to strengthen UK soft power." Leading the inquiry is Labour MP Dame Emily Thornberry, who was once Jeremy Corbyn's shadow defence secretary and whose sceptical views of the UK's Trident nuclear programme infuriated many hard power hardliners. I share her scepticism; surely the UK and the world would be a better place if there were more Yellow Submarines and fewer submarine-launched ballistic missiles, but I suppose that depends on whether you're a bigger fan of Ringo Starr or mutual assured destruction.

In its call for evidence, the inquiry committee encouraged "members of underrepresented groups to submit written evidence." and aimed for "diverse panels of Select Committee witnesses". By broadening the pool of possible inquiry participants, the potential "tangible benefits" of soft power highlighted in the call for evidence might actually materialise for a wide range of cultural workers and organisations in the UK and around the world. Prioritising inclusion in this way should result in "actions which are equitable and not extractive" and "a new story of Britain in and with the world, where soft power should be the outcome of a culture of co-creation, not our goal," argues Marta Foresti, Visiting Senior Fellow at ODI Global, in her 2024 article, ‘British soft power? Invest in culture – at home but especially abroad’.

I'm going to dash off now to begin making the necessary preparations for Eurovision 2025 in earnest, as any self-respecting homosexual would, because who knows, with the Doomsday Clock currently set at 89 seconds to midnight, the closest it has been to human-inflicted Armageddon since it began ticking in 1947, it could be our last. Before I do, I’d like to respond to one of the inquiry’s questions: how might soft power be measured? My recommendation would be to add swagger and swankiness to any current indices. If we don’t, by the end of this parliament, we may never know whether what's left of Britain's cultural and other sorts of soft power - after it’s been shrunk to satisfy a military capability spending spree sparked by Putin and his poodles - has swag or is complete and utter swank. 

And no, even though it might sound like it, I checked, and 89 Seconds to Midnight isn't the title of a Eurovision entry (yet).