Government Record on Education, Employment and Welfare
Baroness Spielman Excerpts(1 week, 4 days ago)
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Baroness Spielman (Con)
My Lords, my noble friend Baroness Evans of Bowes Park, in her excellent speech, and many others, have made strong points about the previous Government’s achievements in education. I will not repeat them, except to say that we are in the bizarre position of having delegations from overseas visiting our schools to see how we have achieved so much in education—even as the current Government work to dismantle the reforms that enabled this great progress.
I want to speak today about young people and their trajectory from childhood to productive and satisfying adulthood. Our national aim should be to build children and young people’s capacity and resilience on every front, yet the current focus of education and welfare systems is working against that. Government education policies overwhelmingly target disadvantage and low achievement. That sounds lovely, but this policy is built around mechanisms that encourage children and young people to view themselves as damaged or less than capable.
Once a child is defined and sees themselves that way, such as through having a SEND label and then perhaps a child disability allowance claim, it is now all too likely that they will become an early PIP claimant, at which point their chances of ever moving into stable employment are increasingly poor. In fact, a decision to grant PIP to a young person who suffers from, say, anxiety or ADHD, may be the single cruellest thing a Government could ever do to them. All too probably, it consigns them unnecessarily to a lifetime of dependency, yet such claims have rocketed in the past two years.
I am afraid that the Timms review shows, by its weakness and its omissions, that there is no real appetite to address this appalling waste of human life. It does not distinguish between some fundamentally different types of condition. There are some disabilities that are lifelong and preclude work entirely. There are some that are lifelong and that will limit some aspects of capacity permanently, but that do not preclude people’s ability and willingness to work; Down syndrome is a good example. There are other conditions that may be temporary or permanent but, for most, need only be temporarily debilitating. Most people diagnosed with anxiety or ADHD should ultimately be successful and happy at work, so a blanket disability label is failing many of them.
The review also does not recognise that the explosion in numbers may partly reflect a loss of confidence and resilience in our population, rather than any real loss of capacity. It also dismisses the very real loss of public confidence in PIP, despite much evidence for this. DWP’s own figures show that detected fraud has tripled in the past year. The review barely touches on the value of work to individuals, but we know that there is a huge human cost of worklessness. The Minister, Sir Stephen Timms MP, seems entirely unconcerned about the apparently uncontrollable increase in PIP spending, described as “not of great concern”. Yet, as Alan Milburn has pointed out, we are spending a lot on young people, but on the wrong things.
My noble friends Lady Coffey, Lady Stedman-Scott, Lord Willetts, and many others have made constructive suggestions. Recent Budgets and legislation have plainly worsened employer willingness and capacity to hire the young, and youth unemployment is predictably rising. Can the Minister tell us whether the Government will direct the Timms review to addressing the difficult questions that, I am afraid, it has so far ducked? Will the Government bring forward measures to modify the policies they have brought in that, no matter how well-intended, are proving damaging to human lives?
Contemporary Cultural Boycotts
Baroness Spielman Excerpts(2 weeks, 4 days ago)
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Baroness Spielman (Con)
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, for securing this debate. I must start by declaring my interest as a trustee of the Victoria and Albert Museum.
The Freedom in the Arts report gives us valuable insight into the worrying state of the arts and cultural sector. As it states, there is
“an interconnected web of … practices … that collectively polices the boundaries of acceptable thought, association, expression and programming within the arts”.
Unsurprisingly, mechanisms that allocate artistic funding funnel most support to currently prominent causes—climate activism, support for Palestine and opposition to Israel, transgender activism and anti-racism—and generally raise the status of people and organisations associated with those causes. But there are damaging consequences to this narrowing, which everyone should be concerned about, whatever their level of interest in and support for those causes.
Like my noble friend Lady Meyer, I take a historical perspective. In western Europe, it was really only in the 15th century that it became socially acceptable and normal to portray non-religious subjects in art. Over several centuries, the Catholic Church none the less monitored art ferociously to enforce approved narratives and discourage the spread of Protestant ideas, using the social penalties it could impose to make artists’ lives difficult—read the story of Veronese’s “Last Supper”. We do not want to return to inquisitions, whether by Governments, religious authorities or self-appointed commissars, and we should not want to return to an age where artistic expression is permitted only in the service of a narrow range of permitted interests and beliefs. But we have somehow moved a long way in that direction.
Artistic freedom eventually prevailed, and that freedom has brought many waves of creative exploration. Of course, that has sometimes been uncomfortable for some, but without exploration there can be no innovation. It is striking to look at how much artistic preoccupations have changed over time: the 1850s saw realism, truth to nature and a rejection of myths and legends; the 1950s saw adaptation to the new post-war world. We have no idea today what the artistic preoccupations of the 2050s may prove to be, but we can be absolutely certain that it is simply intellectual hubris to think that we have achieved a perpetual pinnacle of moral superiority to which all current practitioners in the arts and their successors should be bound.
Then there are the human impacts. I will touch on just four, which are well covered in the report. First, works that do not fit the current template are not being put on, or, too often, they are being shut down. Secondly, people are being shut down for their beliefs, even where they have no particular connection with their work. Many of the gender-critical artists are suffering from that. Thirdly, people are suffering simply because of who they happen to be. Examples have been given of Israeli and Jewish artists and groups that are unable to perform. That is simply intolerable. The fourth group I draw attention to are the young of this country. The status quo is affecting so strongly how they are shaped, both in education and in the community. They quickly learn what the high-status beliefs and opinions are and what not to say or acknowledge. If they are not allowed to see anything that contradicts those beliefs and opinions or explores a fresh direction, their lives are stunted and distorted.
Too many people have ducked the difficult issues here. It is time for a great deal more openness and discussion about rebuilding true artistic freedom. This report gives a very good platform for that.
Artificial Intelligence: Impact on Human Relationships and Society
Baroness Spielman Excerpts(1 month, 3 weeks ago)
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Baroness Spielman (Con)
My Lords, like others, I thank the most reverend Primate for making this the subject of today’s debate and for introducing it so admirably. She wisely reminded us that we must pay proper attention to what it means to be human and to protecting truth and trust, which are essential to healthy societies.
I am thinking of the parallels with the invention of atom-splitting technologies a few decades ago. We suddenly faced huge opportunities and huge risks at the same time. Both optimism and alarm about AI are fully justified. The asymmetric incentives on AI frontier labs described by the noble Lord, Lord Tarassenko, make it too easy for them to give insufficient consideration to harms to humans. I share the view expressedby many today that we need to ensure that there is a strong framework of incentives around AI and that this necessitates clear regulation.
Too often, regulation becomes little more than a transfer of decision-making power from innovators and enterprise-builders to Ministers. This is the wrong approach. We should be using the most reverend Primate’s challenge to help define a set of purposes to frame a strong and flexible regulatory approach—of course reflecting optimism and ambition, but it absolutely should be grounded in thinking about what makes good lives.
One way to harm humans is to kill or maim them, but another way is to deprive them of purpose and value in life. Humans clearly benefit from the personal, social and workplace relationships that give structure and responsibilities to their lives. A few lucky people have sufficient intrinsic motivation and purpose that they will flourish regardless, but most of us need shared challenges and rewards as well as rights and freedoms. If we accidentally lose these, we will be an unhappier society, and AI will not alter the fundamentals of human psychology.
I will speak briefly about education and about younger adults. First, on education, wherever the world takes us, those who are knowledgeable and skilled will have better prospects than those whose potential is underdeveloped. Cognitive psychology shows that we can only think with what we know. We must not abandon knowledge. AI availability does not mean that we should stop teaching our young people to be knowledgeable and skilful and to embrace responsibility and challenge. We must make sure that they do not damage their own learning by offloading the processes of mental development to AI. I think schools are already more alive to the risks here than universities. The higher education sector needs to start discussing, openly and honestly, the undermining of student learning that is already visible to all who look.
The other thing I want to talk about is early career incentives. We can already see the impact of AI on entry-level jobs. This is leaving too many young people underoccupied, miserable and potentially alienated, just when they should be coming into their own as adult contributors. To sustain a good society, it is essential to align tax and labour market policies to provide stable incentives to continue hiring and training the young instead of parking them on expensive benefits. The world will continue to evolve in unpredictable ways but trained and participating young people will be more likely and better able to adapt to the new, as they have done in past decades and centuries. AI-linked regulation and government change should have a particularly strong emphasis on the future lives of the young.