Arts

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer Excerpts

Thursday 1st February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer (LD)]

My Lords, as ever, it is a great honour to follow the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, who put his finger on a very important issue. However, I return to the role that the arts play in activism and campaigning—what the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans called “deepening our sympathies”.

The arts can engage us in a way that a thousand worthy leaflets or an informed speech simply do not. The noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Hudnall, laid that out when she talked about “Mr Bates vs The Post Office”. It took an ITV drama to focus the nation’s attention; two decades of campaigning led up to it but had not been able to focus anybody’s attention on its sufficiently. I am amazed how the scriptwriter, Gwyneth Hughes, managed so brilliantly to condense all that into a drama.

A gut-wrenching example of a brilliant and powerful play that I saw in the last year was Suzie Miller’s “Prima Facie”, which starred Jodie Comer. That play examines a brilliant, hard-working woman who gets crushed between misogyny and the rules of the game devised outwith the reality of women’s experience.

In a very different genre, Ai Weiwei’s recent exhibition at the Design Museum was very thought-provoking. He is an absolute master of stating tragedy with great subtlety, and of addressing immense issues originally and strikingly. We are very lucky to have him living in this country.

At the moment, I am reading Prophet Song by Paul Lynch. I appreciate that he is an Irish writer; of course, the Irish support the arts rather better than we do. It rightly won the Booker Prize, and chillingly portrays the little steps it takes to descend into a totalitarian state: the removal of sympathy, the lessening of empathy as it seeps away from people, neighbours, work colleagues and even family, until the state, working on the resulting fear and isolation, takes total control. It is a very chilling book that I thoroughly recommend.

Paula Rego changed a whole nation’s attitude to abortion through her series of paintings, as the then President of Portugal acknowledged. The power of art to change society for the better simply cannot be overstated. There are lots of other examples of that.

Right now, at Tate Britain, there is a very moving mixed media exhibition, “Women in Revolt!”, which follows women’s activism and campaigning on everything from equal pay to advertising to war. It is a thoroughly worthwhile exhibition and only just down the road. However, it provoked in me the thought that we have come a long way in some regards compared with where we were in the 1970s, but there is still an awfully long way to go. The arts have a very big role to play in that.