Can we trust the Foreign Office's travel advice?
An article from the Times Newspaper by Libby Purves

We no longer run an empire, and the ethics of our recent foreign policy may be subject to debate, yet a cloud of authority, gravitas and respectability still hangs around the words Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Its pronouncements are taken seriously at home and abroad. Having been raised as a diplobrat, playing beneath gloomy reproductions of the Queen’s Annigoni portrait in a series of dusty consular residences, my instinct is to trust it. I wish very strongly to believe that the FCO is wise, and is on our side, requesting and requiring foreigners to refrain from giving us any let or hindrance, as per the dark-blue passport. My earliest memories, indeed, are of my father the consul forever speeding off on urgent missions to rescue Distressed British Subjects (on one occasion a Distressed British Stripper, who had to be brought home for baked beans on toast and comfort).

There is obviously a less effective service to be had now, in these days of mass travel: ask poor Derek Bond, the 72-year-old man who lay on a concrete floor in a South African jail for two weeks because the FBI thought he was someone else entirely, but could not be bothered to fly over and check. On that shameful occasion, it took a media tip-off and a public outcry to galvanise our gallant protectors. But on a more global scale, the wisdom and carefulness of the Foreign Office is being queried. Today even a loyal diplomatic daughter like myself must disinter her head from the sand with a sigh, and admit that the FCO is as capable of weaselling, inefficiency, timidity and general tiresomeness as any other arm of government. On Saturday there will be a plain-spoken debate held by the campaigning group Tourism Concern on the inflammatory motion “Foreign and Commonwealth Office travel advice is inconsistent and often does more harm than good”.

For years now there has been unease about these “FCO Advisories” against non-essential travel, which are looking less and less like the rare, gold-standard bits of counsel that we should deem them to be. The matter is brought to a head by the anniversary of the Bali bomb. The FCO still advises us against any travel to Indonesia. Bali and its neighbours are suffering terribly with average wages in the main industry of the island dropping from £150 to £36 a month; families being destroyed; and 90,000 skilful, witty, careful craftsmen facing ruin and destitution. The dearth of British visitors, and of those from other countries who respect the FCO’s ancient gravitas, is directly connected to the continuing insistence in its literature that there is “significant risk for visitors of further attacks”. Travel insurers refuse cover, and operators pull out.

Yet the Bali bombers were arrested and tried and there have been no similar incidents. Compare that to our treatment of New York after 9/11: Rudolph Giuliani immediately appealed to the world to come to the city and show solidarity in the face of terror, and the FCO never for one moment advised us not to do so, even during the height of the “anthrax” scares in succeeding months. Accusations abound that Foreign Office advice is chronically unbalanced, unfair, obscurely founded and possibly even racist. It might argue that the New York case was special, and that a sophisticated country might be better trusted than a Third World one to ratchet up security measures; even so, it leaves a nasty taste in the mouth. We all know perfectly well why the FCO could not give warning against Manhattan, while Mr Blair was at Mr Bush’s side. Too mortifying. But poor old Bali had nothing to fight back with.

The debate is overdue; a Tourism Concern report on the subject, just out, makes damning reading. And it is a fascinating area to consider: a tangled crossroads of modern issues ranging from the War on Terror to ethical foreign policy, global trade politics and the litigious compensation culture.

The report has various general complaints. One is that it is never made explicit on what grounds the FCO issues any individual piece of advice. This is true: it prefers to give a general impression that it knows awful secrets, rather like the Prime Minister and Jack Straw doing their pre-Iraq stuff about “if you saw the material that passes across my desk. . .” The World Tourism Organisation has called for objectiveness, transparency and co-operation between countries in issuing travel advice, and for geographical precision; but another complaint against our FCO is that officials in developing countries are not consulted properly, or their local knowledge respected. The warnings we get, therefore, are rarely geographically specific. A bomb in a crowded angry city is used to deter us from visiting a coastal village two hundred miles away. It is as if a riot in Toxteth were to frighten you off Polperro.

Indeed, in some cases, whole swaths of Africa are written off. After the suicide bombings in Morocco last year, the FCO suddenly warned visitors against Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, Tanzania and Uganda. Richard Dowden, the director of the Royal African Society, is quoted in the report saying that this was “not credible . . . the idea that all these countries bunched together, covering a vast area, could suddenly become a threat like this from absolutely nowhere is just not believable”. He said he “would not think twice” about visiting them, for they all need visitors and want to fight terrorism.

You could go on and on, and certainly it is alarming to note how differently the warnings work, depending on political allegiance. Never mind the glaring inequity between Manhattan and Bali, it is axiomatic that one bombing in an African state will bring on a prolonged travel ban — and remember that an FCO damning is, effectively, a ban for ordinary tourists because tour operators pull out and insurers will not cover you. Yet a series of Eta bombings and explicit threats to tourists in Spain, an EU partner, brought on only lukewarm cautions and the line “there have not been mass casualties . . . security forces have had considerable success in arresting Eta terrorist groups”. Well, so have the Balinese, and what credit do they get? The principle seems to be that any danger is too much to accept in a Third World country, but that Belgium or Spain would have to go up in radioactive smoke before the FCO advised against spending your money there. (Note: this article was written before the Madrid terrorist attack).

The report’s authors also moot the possibility that there is a directly political element in some of the bans. The case of Gambia is interesting: a low-key coup in 1994 resulted in an immediate “advisory” and cancelled flights; the tourist economy collapsed, British visitors dropping from 52,000 to 14,000. Yet expatriate British residents were never advised to leave, even through the counter-coup. There are claims that the FCO advice to holidaymakers was just a piece of pressure on the interim Government to return to civilian democratic rule: one reporter called Gambia “a test case for Britain’s policy of promoting good government and democracy in Africa”.

But how fair, and how honest, is it to use tourism as a bargaining tool? Is it not up to us, as individual travellers, to decide? Should not a government warning be an honest one, presaging real danger, rather than a way of using our absence as a stick to beat a Third World government? Tourists are not exports. We are free people. Yet we are, to some extent, controlled by FCO advice simply because of the loss of insurance cover, and the fear of tour operators that if they do go in somewhere while a negative advisory is in force they will be sued if some freakish incident occurs.

It is hard enough for developing countries to make a living from tourism. In Bali only one fifth of what tourists spend is seen by the Balinese: yet tourism is, Dewa Made Beratha, the Governor, says, “38 per cent of jobs and more than half our income”. It is not the place of FCO officials to make matters worse, in the name of a theoretical degree of personal security which, frankly, we cannot rely on at home. Already some Third World countries are saying plainly that these bans are selfish: that the Americans and British want their tourists to holiday at home. That is unlikely, but the idea does our reputation little good.

Moreover, if it is clearly shown in debate that the Foreign Office is inconsistent and unreasonable in its warnings, it will become the little boy who cried wolf. Travellers will ignore FCO advice altogether, and blunder off into real danger zones. It is not a comforting prospect.