British Council caught in a real life 'absurd episode'

With the British Council forced into the spotlight amid deteriorating Anglo-Russian relations, Matthew Weaver looks into organisation's background
The Third Man
The Third Man: featuring an earlier British Council crisis
The British Council features in Graham Greene's classic thriller The Third Man where, as the narrator puts it, "the absurd episode of the British Council lecturer" is a central part of the story.

The council now finds itself at the centre of non-fictional "absurd episode" worthy of a Greene novel. It involves a poisoned former spy, a cold-war style diplomatic stand-off and alleged intimidation of British Council officials.

The dispute is not about the British Council itself, which promotes British culture, business and the English language.

Instead, the organisation, which has been operating all over the world for more than 70 years, has become embroiled in worsening relations between Russia and the UK following the death of the former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned in London in 2006.

"The British Council is a cultural organisation and should not be involved in political disputes," says the council's Russia director, James Kennedy.

It was drawn into worsening Anglo-Russian relations when Moscow ordered the UK to close the council's offices in St Petersburg and Yekaterinburg.

Russia accused the council of tax irregularities - a charge it denied. The British government regarded the allegations as spurious and defiantly kept the offices open - a stance described by the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, as "colonial".

Now the St Petersburg office director, Stephen Kinnock, has been stopped by the Russian authorities accused of drink driving.

The British government suggests he is being picked on. Kinnock is the son of the former Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, who is the British Council's chairman.

The organisation was set up in 1934 and is answerable to the Foreign Office. Its remit is "to build mutually beneficial cultural and educational relationships between the United Kingdom and other countries, and increase appreciation of the United Kingdom's creative ideas and achievements".

The French and German equivalents are the Institut Francais and the Goethe-Institute.

The council has an annual turnover of more than £500m, including almost £200m of government grants. Much of its activities are devoted to providing language classes.

Its cultural promotion includes funding a production of Love's Labour's Lost in Afghanistan, the first Shakespeare production there for 17 years, but it has prompted controversy in recent years by broadening its traditional arts role into other areas including technology and tackling climate change.

This has prompted anxiety from arts establishment, who are concerned that it does not become a producer of propaganda for the British government.

In an interview in the Observer last August, the novelist Fay Weldon accused the council of squeezing library funding in favour of increasing activities in the Muslim world.

"We're trying to impose our culture and values on the culture of countries that don't share them," she said

And last week, leading artists including Peter Blake and Anthony Caro expressed their dismay at the disbanding of the council's individual art departments.

In response, the chief executive Martin Davidson says: "The British Council remains deeply committed to the arts in all its forms. But like any organisation, we need to review our focus from time to time."

With events becoming increasingly murky in Russia, it may certainly be forced to review its focus there.

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