Britain is increasingly seen as a bit-part player. That’s down both to our post-Brexit identity crisis and being gradually overtaken by emerging economies such as India and Brazil.
But it’s also because British diplomats don’t have the skills they need to advance Britain’s interests with purpose and credibility.
Take foreign languages. Almost three quarters of Britain’s ambassadors aren’t fluent in the language of the countries where they serve. In the Middle East, most diplomats don’t hit the expected standard in Arabic. In Moscow, one third can’t speak Russian and the picture is similar for Mandarin speakers across our vast diplomatic network in China.
Arabic, Russian and Chinese are the British government’s top priority hard languages. It is a waste of money and effort to send diplomats to Moscow, Beijing, Riyadh and other places to sit in the embassies, reinterpreting BBC World News and spending their time on video calls to influencers in London.
In 2013, William Hague as foreign secretary, said: ‘Diplomacy is the art of understanding different cultures, and using this understanding to predict and influence behaviour. Speaking the local language is the essential first step in this process.’ He reprioritised languages after a decade of decline and invested in a new Foreign Office Language School.
With Hague at the helm, I believed the Foreign Office would recognise that foreign language capability is a core part of diplomatic tradecraft. In 2013-14, I studied Russian for ten months and it hugely improved my ability to operate there. At a time when the crisis in Ukraine was bubbling up, the Foreign Office briefly acknowledged the enormity of its deficit in Russia expertise after a generation of post-cold war disinvestment.
Yet after Hague left the Foreign Office in 2014, interest in foreign languages faded under Hammond and subsequent foreign secretaries (with the exception of Jeremy Hunt). In 2016, Tom Fletcher, author of The Naked Diplomat, highlighted that only 38 to 39 per cent of language speakers at the Foreign Office were attaining their target level. Fletcher said: ‘the FCO should be more exacting in requiring language exams to be passed.’
There are a host of reasons for the Foreign Office’s underperformance. Partly, it’s cultural. New generations of diplomats see the task of studying languages for up to two years as career-limiting. Foreign Office directors don’t take sufficient responsibility for ensuring that officers in their teams hit their language targets. FCDO staff who don’t speak languages think it unfair if linguists get preferential treatment in speaker jobs. Officers are yanked out of training because they are needed for other work. No one seems to care whether officers take their exams or not. The HR system actively promotes failure. A lack of grip at the top of the organisation can suck the life out of initiatives for change.
In 2018, the Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee set a target for the Foreign Office to hit 80 per cent attainment across all foreign languages by 2020. As Permanent Secretary, Simon MacDonald took languages seriously and oversaw a near doubling of attainment from a dismal 38 per cent pass rate in 2016 to a more respectable 73 per cent in 2020. Yet under Philip Barton, progress flatlined and attainment rates have sagged.
A new Permanent Secretary will take over at King Charles Street in early 2025 and the time is ripe for new ideas and an injection of life into the Foreign Office’s language programme. They should incentivise success and set clearer expectations on officers and leaders to tackle failure or underperformance.
But that alone won’t help. Failure costs the Foreign Office millions of pounds every year as we try to train officers from scratch in hard languages that they have neither the motivation nor the aptitude to master. Would it be better and less expensive to work with universities and create pools of language talent through degree apprenticeships? Should the Cabinet Office introduce a Fast-Stream programme for the highest priority languages? Should the Foreign Affairs Committee have stronger powers to hold the Foreign Office to account for its failure to meet its corporate targets?
In its 2013 Lost for Words report, the British Academy, pointed out that the ‘government needs to develop and demonstrate its understanding of foreign countries… in order to drive UK diplomatic excellence and maintain national security.’ The Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee at that time said, ‘The consequences of being lost in translation in international affairs are all too often very real and can be tragic.’
The current chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Emily Thornberry, should take note that, more than a decade later, British diplomats are still lost for words.
Comments