Economy: Creative Industries

Lord Bragg Excerpts

Thursday 18th June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bragg (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, for securing this debate. It is most important and most timely. Unfortunately—when I say “unfortunately”, I mean it with complimentary intent—her speech was so comprehensive and brilliant that I could spend most of the rest of my speech saying “as the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, said”. She has enabled me to cross out several pages of what I was going to say, which will be a relief for everybody in this House—but then I thought, “Well, repetition has its place”. It had better have. We remember:

“A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!”—

one of Shakespeare’s best lines; or in “Macbeth”—

“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow”—

another good line; so I am going in behind those two. My next remark is exactly like the noble Baroness’s, so I am going to stop this and get on with it.

The creative industry in this country is a beacon. It has high skills of a world-class order, a phrase which I shall use time and again. That can be proved but, as the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, said, we do not have the time. It is niche-rich in the crafts and arts of film-making; in everything to do with stagecraft and the people who appear on stage; and in the performing arts. One of its great practitioners and exemplars, my friend the noble Lord, Lord Lloyd-Webber, is in his place today, and I am very pleased to see him here. He has proved that bringing talents together in this city can topple what was thought to be an unassailable fact, that only Americans can do musical theatre. That went for a burton some time ago.

The creative arts in this country are also extraordinarily efficient. There is still a lingering idea that these are long-haired—I am sorry about that—people drooping around the place who cannot really knit. In fact, if you look at plays, exhibitions, films, programmes and concerts, you find that they open when they say they will, they run for as long as they say will, and they almost all come out making some sort of profit and give great delight and hurt not. They also produce massive returns for a little investment, as the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, also said. For £1 of state investment £2, £12 or £16 comes back. It is an extraordinary economic feat and, again, despite being put to the fore in the opening speech, that fact is often obscured. We somehow do not like to think that the arts make money. We think it is art for art’s sake, meaning they will get on with it and we need not bother about it.

We have to bother about it now because of the power that the arts are bringing to us all over the place. Reputationally, they have become our cultural world service. Wherever you go, people know about British writers, British theatre, British actors—and on and on it goes. This is a benign influence. It not only brings money back to the country but shines the right sort of light on this country and brings the right sort of prestige in area after area. I compare what is going on in the arts with what is going on in scientific research in this country. We have less than 1% of the world’s population yet we publish more than 16% of the research documents in science. We are second only to America. We punch way above our weight, and we do almost precisely the same in the arts.

We also are provenly dynamic in bringing together and cohering communities that have almost fallen apart and in enlightening those which have been lying quiet for some time. A small example is in the county of Cumbria, where a grant to the Kendal Brewery Arts Centre will give it a place in the cultural rural economy of the Lake District which will undoubtedly enhance it. The word “subsidy” should be made redundant. I think it should be banned because it is nothing like a subsidy. It is an investment and “investment” has a positive and decent ring to it. That investment in Kendal will create more jobs and activity and bring what the Lake District desperately needs, which is a coherence of the cultural possibilities in that area. We see the same in Manchester, Gateshead and cities and towns all over the country. We have more than 350 literary festivals and almost as many music festivals, art festivals, dance festivals and documentary film festivals. There is nothing like it anywhere else in the world. They are bringing not only pleasure to people like us—me, everybody here, and everybody else—but a feeling that there is something that can be done with that which we thought was just a side issue, and on it goes.

The popularity of the arts is astounding. Who would have thought 15 or 20 years ago that the British Museum would be the greatest visitor attraction in this country? Who would have thought 10 or 15 years ago that more people would go to Tate Modern than to Arsenal? Who would have thought that you could scarcely get a ticket for the RSC or the National Theatre or for the work done by the noble Lord, Lord Lloyd-Webber, or all over the West End? Whether it is a straight play or musical theatre or whatever, the venues are packed out and people are piling in to see these creations in the arts which are coming from the people who live here.

We have such resources when we decide to put them together. We are working towards something that has ceased to be a small matter or something we can ignore. Take the BBC, for instance. It is a unique cultural institution. It is the biggest institution of its kind in this country and probably in the world. It is a great force for the arts. The Proms are about to start. Radio 4 is the biggest commissioner of drama in the world. We have had “Wolf Hall”, and we have arts programmes. Then, there are arts on ITV and Channel 4, and Sky Arts commissions new drama and new arts programmes and is rolling along. That conglomeration in one place makes this city, as well as Manchester, Glasgow and, to a certain extent, Cardiff, a whirlpool of interconnecting talents and possibilities which brings together people who are creating an industry which is worth calling and treating like an industry. I have not even mentioned the great schools of drama, music and dance which bear comparison with—and, in fact, exceed—most in the rest of the world.

So why are we slashing and tampering with key investments when the arts are in such a strong state? It makes no sense to me. State intervention in various areas can seem risky, but it is not at all risky in the arts, as the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, pointed out. There does not seem to be a single risk-taker. All over the place, small amounts are being put in and huge amounts are coming back, but in many cases it depends on a key contribution from the state or local authorities. It is almost like a virtuous triangle: the state puts in something which is almost like a key—it unlocks, it is an enabler; then sponsors come in; and then the box office comes in and the thing will roll. Why do you need the key in the lock in the first place? It is because quite a lot of what happens in the arts has to happen with no money coming in. It is called research, preparation or rehearsal. Nothing is coming in at all. That happened, for example, with “Matilda”. The amount of time that took to research could not be paid for by box office or sponsors, because there were none; it was not being performed. It had to have something to keep it going. Now it is cascading money into this country from performances all over the world. The key question is: why do the Government not feed what is patently so successful and works across the social waterfront? What is to be gained by starving it? It is baffling.

Look at what the Government do with their money elsewhere. Look at Defra, whose antics seem directed at laming the farming industry. That gets money all over the place and wasted all over the place, and nobody seems to bother very much. Look at our defence procurement, which is ridiculous and scandalous—these ships that have not been built for planes that have not arrived, or pilots whom we cannot train. What has that to do with any sense? But we go along with it, we bear it, and we think it is for some common good. I do. I wish they would move faster and that our defence was better, but there you go; we put up with it. It gets masses of money compared with what is given to the arts. And so it goes on. The amount that we spend on law, sometimes on cases that last more than 30 years, has gone beyond ridicule. It is a disgrace. It is silly. Noble Lords, I am sure, will be interested to know that in Athens, where the sort of law that we approve of started, every case took one day and took place in the marketplace. We could learn a little from that, but we need not go that far. We could learn something from all the money that is spent and squandered in those ways.

So why are the creative arts penalised—as they are at the moment—when they should be not only celebrated but encouraged to grow? It is a thriving sector; it is not, as people think, an add-on. William Morris wrote:

“I do not want art for a few, any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few”.

What we want is as many people as possible to be awakened to the possibilities of art. As we have said, it is to do with comprehensive and compulsory teaching in schools, letting people use their imaginations and following through people’s imaginations. We know that children are very imaginative and what they can do, and then it stops, not because of some biological clock-stopping but because it is not given opportunities and cultivated. But if we have a layer of possible creativity from the very beginning, there is very little that we cannot achieve in this country.

We have a fair chance of catching up with the mineral-rich countries, the population-rich countries and the industry-rich countries if we follow this line in our economy, if we release, as it were, the dark matter in more and more people—still too few, as William Morris said. We should let loose ideas and liberate people who can come forward—as many have done increasingly, but not enough—to challenge, to change and to make things glow, whether in science or the arts, and create an economy that feels completely different. It will have to be, because this is the century, in my view, in which all the prizes will go to the most creative. We have all the building blocks in place. What we need is enlightenment from the centre.