King’s Speech

Lord Blackwater Excerpts

Tuesday 19th May 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blackwater (Con) (Maiden Speech)]

My Lords, it is a great honour to follow the noble Lord, Lord Isaac, and his extremely intelligent speech. I speak partly as a professor, and I know that what he is saying about higher education is exactly true and that it is a great challenge for all parties across this House.

I also echo the sentiments of the noble Lord, Lord Hobby—I speak as a fellow debutant—who made an exceptional maiden speech. I congratulate the noble Lord on that, and I echo what he said about the welcome that we get when we come to this House. In the short time I have had the privilege to sit here, I have been deeply gratified by the warmth of the welcome extended not just by my noble friends—who may perhaps feel that they have a duty to do so—but by noble Lords from all parts of this House. For this great generosity of spirit I am sincerely grateful.

With equal sincerity, I readily salute the kindness and professionalism of the clerks, our magnificent doorkeepers and all the other staff who make this important part of our constitution actually work. They did an exceptionally superb job during the induction process and in preparing me for my introduction. As those of us who write books say in our acknowledgements, all mistakes are entirely the responsibility of the author.

I am particularly grateful to my sponsors—my noble and learned friend Lord Garnier and my noble friend Lord Swire. I have had the honour of knowing both for, I realise, more than half my life. Such is their distinction that I always knew that they would one day adorn these Benches; it never occurred to me, however, that I would sit here with them. It is rather humbling. I could not have wanted for better sponsors, nor better friends.

My one regret is that a man for whom I have the highest regard, the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield, had to make his valedictory speech yesterday. He has been a great friend to me for many years, a great example and a great mentor. He was also my PhD examiner, so I owe him a great deal, and I wish him the happiest and longest possible retirement. I know that he had enormous and sincere tributes from this House yesterday, and that we will all miss him, but I presume to say that I may miss him more than most.

I have taken the title of my barony from a river. The Blackwater enters Essex from the North Sea and flows first through the ancient borough of Maldon, famous for the battle where the Vikings beat Ethelred the Unready’s Anglo-Saxons in 991. This established a tradition of euroscepticism in Essex that lasts to this day. Maldon is also known for its annual mud race, in which hardy people heave themselves from one bank of the Blackwater to the other, at low tide, swamped by brown sticky stuff. I am striving to avoid an oratorical emulation of this in my speech.

I have lived near the Blackwater all my life. Growing up on the Essex marshes, I would go and paddle in it and—usually unsuccessfully, because they sank—play with toy boats in it. That at least helped me to realise that I was not cut out for a naval career. Now it is the main river nearest to where my family and I live. A little further downstream, it changes its name and becomes the River Pant. I am relieved we live where we do, because the comic possibilities of a Lord Pant are self-evidently endless.

Noble Lords will recall the tension of preparing for their maiden speech. For me, there was an extra complication: I am conscious of the convention that one must not be controversial. Although I have been a professor of history for some years, since the 1980s I have earned most of my living as a Fleet Street columnist. In that line of business one tends to get sacked if one is not controversial, so your Lordships see before you a man struggling to break the habits of a lifetime.

However, there is one subject very close to my heart and relevant to today’s debate on the gracious Speech that might, I hope, provoke noble Lords into only agreement: the importance of teaching music in schools, which was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley. Sixty years ago, at my tiny state village primary school, I and my schoolfellows were all taught by a visionary teacher to play the recorder and read music. An attempt was also made to teach us all to sing, although it rather failed in my case.

Today’s reality is different. I am associated with two musical charities: I am the chairman of one of London’s greatest choirs, the London Chorus; and I am the president of the Chamber Music Foundation. Despite the excellent review of music education by Darren Henley in 2014 and the promise by the then Government to develop a national plan for such teaching, the availability of both general music and specific instrumental and voice teaching in schools has continued to decline. It did not help that my noble friend Lord Gove, who was a superb Education Secretary in many respects—including this one—was moved on, after welcoming the Henley review, before he was able to ensure that its recommendations were properly implemented.

Henley’s first recommendation was that a child’s experience of music should include performing, composing, listening, reviewing and evaluating it. This has come nowhere near fruition. One of our leading music professors recently told me that there are whole areas of the country where music teaching is simply unavailable to state school pupils beyond the age of 14. Arts Council-funded hubs exist to assist schools in teaching music, but many schools have no contact with them and no qualified music teachers. To fulfil the demands of the national curriculum, primary schools need offer only one hour of music a week; that usually leaves no room at all for instrumental teaching.

In the time available to me today, I can barely begin to describe the deficiencies of music education— I hope to return to it at length another time—but I should like to leave noble Lords with one statistic to contemplate: the number of students taking A-level music in England has fallen by more than 44% since 2010 to fewer than 5,000 in 2025. These are the same people whom the great Sir Hubert Parry, a distinguished forebear of my friend, the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede, called “we singing English”—no more, I fear.

The profession of music in Britain, in the way it creates both performers and their audiences, must inevitably suffer. However, since we all know that music expresses so much that words cannot, all those who fail to encounter it properly are having not just their civilisational development but their emotional development severely retarded. For generations, we have rightly expected children to leave school literate. All I ask is that we should be able to expect them to leave school musically literate as well.