Creative Industries: Creating Jobs and Productivity Growth

Lord Brennan of Canton Excerpts

Thursday 6th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brennan of Canton (Lab) (Maiden Speech)]

My Lords, five minutes is two minutes more than you need for a song to make you laugh or cry, make you fall in love or change your life for ever, so it must be plenty of time for a maiden speech. I thank Black Rod and everyone who works in this House, including my noble colleagues from across the House, for their extraordinary kindness to me over the past 48 hours, since I was introduced to this place.

I come from an immensely privileged background. Both my parents left school at 14 but, in our working-class household, education was everything, love was everywhere and music was the soul of our family. It still is, as my wife, Amy, and daughter, Siobhan, will attest. I mentioned the staff of this House earlier. I want to single out the cleaners, who too often are taken for granted. My late mother, Beryl Evans, was a miner’s daughter who worked as a cleaner. When I was first elected to Cardiff City Council in 1991, I took her to the mayor-making ceremony in the splendid surroundings of Cardiff City Hall. Overly proud of my achievement, I showed her around the grand marble building and asked her what she thought. She looked all around the cavernous halls and said, “Imagine having to clean this”. It is a lesson I have never forgotten.

My late father, Michael Brennan, was taken from his classroom in west Cork at the age of 14 by his father to work on the family farm, to the dismay of his teachers. But he could quote Shakespeare, and imbued in me and my three siblings—Colleen, Nuala and Patrick—a philosophy greater than any I learned from books or university when he recited his own mantra:

“Help the weak against the strong,

love the old when you’re young,

own a fault when you’re wrong,

when you’re angry hold your tongue,

stand your round and give a song,

and don’t forget where you come from.”

That is why I say I come from a privileged background, albeit more shovelry than chivalry. Part of that background as a young man was encountering my two now-ennobled comrades who introduced me as supporters in this House: my noble friends Lord Kinnock and Lord Murphy of Torfaen—two extraordinary people I am honoured to call my friends.

I am immensely proud to enter this House as a Labour Peer under a Labour Government, and I am proud to support that Labour Government. I am proud that my Government have put the creative industries at the heart of their economic strategy; recognising that, as well as being essential for our human souls, creativity and the arts are key components of economic growth and of what makes this country great. For too long, that essential insight has been undervalued in our national discourse. But in praising my colleagues in government, including the Prime Minister, who has spoken passionately about how music changed his life, I want to gently nudge my colleagues on the mechanism that underpins the economic success of our creative industries, namely the law of copyright in the age of artificial intelligence.

I want to make a plea for human intelligence and EI—emotional intelligence—over AI, artificial intelligence. AI is a great servant, including to the creative industries, but it would be a terrible master if we allowed it to become that. In a previous incarnation, I introduced a Private Member’s Bill in the other place, the Copyright (Rights and Remuneration of Musicians, Etc.) Bill, to update the law of copyright to ensure that musicians, songwriters and composers receive their proper share of the vast sums of money collected because of their creative genius. I declare an interest as a proud member of the Musicians’ Union and the Ivors Academy of songwriters and composers, who has received small, occasional royalties for my songwriting for the legendary parliamentary rock band, MP4.

Incidentally, I have been encouraged—not that I need any encouragement—to form a new band in this place, and various names have been suggested. The best so far is an echo of my political hero, Aneurin Bevan. The suggestion for the Lords rock band name is “Lower than Ermine”, which I thought was rather good, but I am open to further suggestions, as well as in search of a noble drummer.

Returning to the theme of the debate, I note that this House recently considered AI and the creative industries, and I simply add this: artificial intelligence creates nothing—it simply generates probabilities. There is no soul in the machine. To return to Nye Bevan once more, AI is a desiccated calculating machine. It is an exciting technology that will save lives in the field of health, but we should never allow those who profit from it to steal from the furnace of human creativity by scraping content to produce a facsimile of human creativity without reward for the artists we cherish. Rather than undermining our creators, let us consider how to enhance their value and remuneration.

In recent years, there has been a vinyl revival in the music industry. Instead of allowing tech companies to perform the equivalent of transferring a farmer’s land to an oil company for drilling without permission or compensation, let us instead introduce new VINL—voice, image, name and likeness—rights for our creators, whether national treasures such as Paul McCartney or Elton John, or new artists such as Imogen and the Knife or Welsh Music Prize-winning Lemfreck.

The creative industries are the fastest-growing part of our economy. The cake has been growing in size; let us not give it away to those who seek to steal it, and let us ensure that those who create the recipe and bake the cake get more than mere crumbs from the table.