The British Council will divert GBP 7.5 million - nearly a third of the public money it spends in Europe - to countries from Saudi Arabia to Kazakhstan so that it can play its part in the war on terrorism, The Times wrote. The British Council operates with GBP 186 million a year in British taxpayers' money.
The changes, to involve scrapping traditional arts activities in Continental Europe in favour of projects designed to prevent Muslim youths from being indoctrinated by extremists sympathetic to al-Qaeda, will mark the biggest shift in focus at the state-funded cultural body since it was set up in the 1930s. Most of the measures will be implemented this year.
Martin Davidson, Director-General designate of the British Council, told The Times that part of his mission was to build and repair cultural relations with Muslims in the Middle East and Central Asia. Iraq and Afghanistan are two of the fifteen countries that will receive a 50 percent increase in funding.
"We started a year ago to ask the question: given the gap in trust that is becoming increasingly well-documented between Britain and the Muslim world, what are we going to do to react to that," Davidson asked.
The initiatives include a GBP 20 million scheme to combat radicalisation of Muslim youths in Pakistan and other predominantly Muslim states.
"We are trying to bridge a gap that has probably always been there. We are just identifying it more clearly than probably we have done before," Davidson told The Times.
Traditional projects in Europe, such as the London Sinfonietta's tour of the Baltic states last year, will no longer receive funding, and the British Council libraries, popular with travellers and expatriates, will be closed unless they can fund themselves by running education courses. The British Council generates about GBP 300 million in revenue a year from teaching courses.
"This is the most significant shift certainly since the fall of the Berlin Wall and probably longer." Davidson said.
Györgyi Patkó, communications director for the British Council in Hungary, said the office would shift its education focus from language teaching to teacher training in light of the hundreds of language schools now operating in the country as well as a requirement for all middle-schoolers to learn English. From the autumn of 2007, the British Council in Hungary will no longer offer language courses. Its library will close and be transferred to the capital's Szabó Ervin Library. The changes will not affect, however, the 21 information centres the British Council operates in libraries around the country.
Source: The Times of London / Hungarian News Agency (MTI)
