Richard Heller: World needs a voice of truth and integrity

Since its launch in 1932, the BBC World Service has become the most popular and most trusted news service in the globe. It has won millions of friends for our country and helped to sell untold quantities of British goods and services in highly competitive markets. In country after country where people have lived under lies and repression it has kept alive the values of integrity and freedom, and become a catalyst for "people power" in their ultimate liberation. In times of upheaval, when false rumours can destroy businesses and kill people, it has offered the priceless gifts of truth and certainty. All this has been achieved with under-stated professionalism on small budgets against strident and better-funded competitors.

In short, the BBC World Service is a rare British success story. Now, for the sake of trivial savings, it is about to lose over a quarter of its staff, five entire language services and about a fifth of its global audience. Other vital language services will disappear from radio and will be provided only online.

Looked at in isolation, all of the cuts may seem plausible. Does this country really need to provide an Albanian broadcasting service? But the modern world should teach us that every country is important, and that we can never know when any particular country will present a crisis. In the 1930s, when the World Service began, millions of people agreed with Nancy Mitford's Uncle Matthew that Abroad was Beastly. They supported Neville Chamberlain's infamous phrase before Munich: "a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing."

Today there are no faraway countries, no peoples of whom we can afford to know nothing. Not long ago a quarrel involving Albanian people was so important to us that we sent troops to their country. The Balkans is still a volatile region where British interests and lives could be at stake, but besides Albanian, the World Service will also be axing its Serbian and Macedonian services. We are discarding assets in these and other countries which took years to create, and worse, we are cutting off our friends, those who most admire our values and our way of life.

It might also sound plausible to shift the Ukrainian, Turkish, Russian and Chinese services online. But to do so means abandoning the poor, who do not have access to the internet, and it also entails a loss of authority, as the BBC's output will be put on level terms with all the Wiki and whacky stuff pumped out on the internet.

A few weeks ago in this newspaper, I urged the Government to give up the trappings of being a Great Power. It is bitterly ironic that the Government should now cut back on the one legacy of Great Power status which has done a consistently good job for our country.

However, I might have known this would happen, because of the iron law of modern management: any bureaucratic organisation in any major cost-cutting exercise is certain to cut the wrong costs.

The Government could have saved billions on the independent nuclear deterrent which makes us more dependent on the United States, or the aircraft carrier which will never carry aircraft. It might have looked at the invisible millions (invisible to taxpayers, anyway) spent on intelligence services which could not discover the truth about Iraq or were too frightened to reveal it.

The Government might have tackled corruption and waste within the overseas aid budget, including the public scandal of the Commonwealth Development Corporation, privatised to the personal enrichment of its senior managers. All of these expensive camels were spared while the government strained at the gnat of the World Service.

Of course, another bureaucracy was involved in the decision, which increased exponentially the chances of choosing the wrong target. The BBC still spends vastly on the baleful legacy of John Birt, managers babbling gobbledygook, accountants making BBC staff pay imaginary bills to use resources the BBC owns already.

It spends even more money providing broadcasting services indistinguishable from commercial output, and filling up programmes with phone-ins: more airtime for airheads. It splashes out money to talentless presenters with talented agents. All of this money constantly leeches away from the licence-payer, while money is saved on the World Service – a unique heritage from a great era in the BBC's life.

The World Service cuts are stupid and mean-spirited. They betray our friends and our values. They will reduce the global supply of truth and give more space to liars and fantasists. For the sake of saving candle ends, we are blowing out candles all over the world.

Richard Heller is an author and journalist and former adviser to Denis Healey. His new cricket novel The Network has just been published.