Europe: Youth Mobility

Lord Berkeley of Knighton Excerpts

Thursday 30th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley of Knighton (CB)]

My Lords, I welcome the noble Lord, Lord Moraes, and very much enjoyed hearing his soft Scottish accent. In fact, we have heard a duo of Scottish accents.

We are discussing a hugely complicated area, as we have just heard, but the complications are essentially bureaucratic, economic and political. I was very interested to hear the noble Lord, Lord Frost, talk about his perception of what the EU had offered. I take his point about our being able to go to only one country while others might be able to come here. However, I was also very pleased to hear him recognise, with all his knowledge and expertise in this area, that we need to do something for touring artists and musicians and, if we can, for youth mobility.

The ability to travel and experience the world is profoundly important. It is an important aspect of human behaviour and indeed civilisation. That is not complicated. Going back to the Renaissance and before, curiosity, that prerequisite of intellect, has led people to travel, learn and exchange ideas. Think of the Grand Tour—think of what Turner painted when he toured or what the noble Baroness, Lady Featherstone, found when she toured. Students of language improve their mastery by visiting and speaking to natives in their mother tongue. I doubt whether many noble Lords have not at some point improved their French, Italian, Spanish or German in France, Italy, Spain or Germany.

Perhaps I could refer to some personal reminiscences. My father, Lennox Berkeley, learned his trade as a composer when Maurice Ravel took him to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger. That quintessentially English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams studied with Ravel and always paid tribute to what he learned. More recently, George Benjamin, one of our leading composers, immersed himself in French music in studies with Olivier Messiaen. Many British composers have benefited, as have I, from visits to IRCAM, Pierre Boulez’s research institute investigating electronic music in the Beaubourg centre. We need to protect our soft power and the voice of our leading artists is a soft power.

Talking of soft power, I am extremely concerned to hear that the British Council is heavily in debt, owing to loss of income from English language teaching during Covid. I hope the Government can reassure us that they will support the British Council, which not only helps with the exchange of ideas and helps us take works of art abroad—my opera with Ian McEwan would not have happened in Rome were it not for British Council support—but fosters the exchange of ideas.

The Government must try to make sure that the British Council does not sink beneath the waves of the English Channel. It is a really good advert for UK culture, as is the BBC World Service. I must tell noble Lords that I was informed today that it has had to institute some major cuts, despite Government investment.

Youth mobility is surely part of growing up, as we have heard. I fear that, if it is not protected and enhanced, it will become, like music education, the preserve of the well off. Reacting to initiatives from the EU, Priti Patel, the shadow Foreign Secretary, said that she thought youth mobility would be damaging to freedom of movement and that it would relax freedom of movement rules. What is the Government’s view of this? In my view, it is overly paranoid. Where would we be without our architects experiencing the work of European architects, without writers immersing themselves in foreign climes, or without cooks sampling international traditions? I would like to see us rejoin Erasmus; although it was quite right of the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, to talk in glowing terms of the Turing Scheme, it is not Erasmus and it is not reciprocal.

I want to see better rules about cabotage—these are utterly ridiculous. If you are taking a symphony orchestra or a ballet company abroad, you have to exchange your truck on entering Europe, and you then have to exchange it again after every two venues. That adds incomparably to the cost of touring.

There are things that we can do. The noble Lord, Lord Frost, intimated that there are things that could be tweaked, and that is a good start for all of us. As the right reverend Prelate said at the beginning of the debate, let us not get into well-rehearsed discussions about Brexit but let us see what we can do to improve where we are, and possibly move on from there. I want to see future generations have the opportunities that the right reverend Prelate mentioned. I want them to have the opportunities that we had—to go to Paris and to Berlin, and to discover things and exchange ideas with their counterparts in Europe. I hope that the Government may be able to move us in that direction.