Museums

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Tuesday 15th November 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I, too, begin by thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, whom I reflect I have known for 37 years, which is a long time back in history, is it not?

Much of my speech will be taken up by the words “such as”, rather than just talking about the People’s History Museum, but I should declare an interest at the beginning. I am a vice-president of the European Parliament Former Members Association—the whole lot of them, all 28 states, sadly soon to be 27. One job I have undertaken there is to try to get some order into the archives. I pick up on the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Clark, because there is a tendency for people to undervalue their relatives. Like the noble Lord, our project was motivated by discovering the large number of cases where papers were thrown away, so we decided to be proactive and to encourage people to donate or leave their papers with any public institution that was interested in taking them. For instance, one of my colleagues, Alf Lomas, who will almost certainly never join us here, deposited newspapers in the Bishopsgate Institute. Another, Stan Newens, has deposited his papers in the University of Essex. They are all around; and I will come to that at the end.

There are many other archives. One of the first projects I was associated with was getting the archives of the Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society, now long gone, put on to microfiche and deposited in a number of libraries, because there was a real fear that the minute books would disappear when that co-op was taken over. Indeed, the museum at the Royal Arsenal Co-op was broken up by the CWS—some of it went to Greenwich and some of it went to Rochdale—and it was a stark warning that we did the right thing at the time.

I congratulate the People’s History Museum on its breadth. We are talking about people’s history. I have said on many occasions that not all people vote for the Labour Party. Roughly a third of working-class people vote for the Conservative Party, and they also have a history. In many cases, it is a very noble history. Also in our past are a lot of non-party-aligned people—in the Methodist Church, for instance—and in the various radical parts of the Liberal Party, who helped to build the country we have today. The National Museum of Labour History has played a valuable part in that.

Incidentally, the National Museum of Labour History also has the files of the European Parliamentary Labour Party, and has given them a place where they can be consulted, where people can see at least some of the history—I am sure that a lot of it is not in there—of what went on in Brussels and Strasbourg. It is probably as well that some of it is not in there, actually. I am sure that it has a record of the visit of the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, to Strasbourg, when he came over to try to sort out the warring factions in the Labour group, of which I was one.

I move on to a couple of other examples which I do not think are quite as good. I am a member of the Working Class Movement Library, which is based just up the road from Manchester in Salford. My criticism is that I think it is a bit too sectarian. It has not reached out, as it should have done, to the Conservative group on Salford Council, so it constantly has its grants opposed. I am not saying that the Conservative group is wrong; I am saying that a bit of reaching out and charm offensive would do no harm in that instance.

I move on to another body that I was in but was expelled from—it is not just the Labour Party that gets rid of me. That was the Marx Memorial Library. That went through a very sectarian phrase. It was quite mad, because the Marx Memorial Library, thanks to the efforts of the highly unlikely duo of Lord Woodrow Wyatt and Richard Balfe MEP, received a large National Lottery grant, but it then went through a sectarian period and got rid of virtually everybody who did not fit into its little categories. It needs to think its way through again, because it is not exactly the brightest thing to do to get rid of people who are getting you money—maybe the Marx Memorial Library already has some.

I shall make one final point. We have lots of papers deposited in lots of places. I have tried to start a project at European level to record where the papers are. It is no good saying that we want all the papers to be in one place. The European Parliament set up an archive, but it did not get much in it because a lot of people wanted to donate to their local museum or library. We need, at a British as well as a European level, a comprehensive reference and data point where the libraries and institutions can declare what they have, so the researchers will have a much better way to find the resources that already exist. If something can be done to move that forward, it would indeed be a noble endeavour.