Arts and Creative Industries: Freelancers and Self-employed Workers

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Thursday 15th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, it is an immense pleasure to follow the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, and to have the privilege of being the first to congratulate him on introducing this Question with such skill, knowledge, empathy and thoroughness.

In the short time I have, I will focus on one of the things he said: the way in which what we still think of as atypical jobs are ceasing to be atypical. I look at my children, who range in ages from five to 21, and I do not think that any of them will ever have a job as we understood that word in the 20th century. They are likely to go through life constantly reskilling and freelancing, and adapting to a rapidly accelerating technological revolution. We should not be frightened of that. I know that there is a great sense that AI will put everyone out of work, but that same argument has been made about almost every technological advance since the Industrial Revolution—and yet the number of jobs keeps growing. What it will do is fragment the labour market further; we will become more and more specialised as we are freed up from the current jobs we do to find much more niche employments.

The Government have been very slow to adapt to the consequences of that. We still have a set of labour rules, social security rules and pension rules that are designed for mass workforces, going back to Chamberlain’s Holidays with Pay Act 1938. However, that is not the world that our children are growing up in; it literally belongs to another century. Instead of looking at freelancers as some subset, we need to start thinking about whether this will be the future of the entire workforce and about how we need to change our fiscal and employment rules—starting with the abolition of IR35, which is the bane of every freelancer. I declare my interest as a freelance journalist.

I hope that one thing that will come out of this is that we do not end up with only state employees being outside this benign revolution. It is not a revolution we should fear; it is one that will create more wealth and liberate more talent, and Ministers should not stand in its way.

Channel 4: Annual Report

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Thursday 21st July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My Lords, given that Channel 4 is currently publicly owned, the Government are fully entitled to comment on the contents of its annual report. As I say, it is usual practice for departments to review annual reports. We cannot direct a public body to change what it says but it is quite proper for us to make representations. The Government are clear that we have the long-term interests of Channel 4 at heart in want to ensure that it continues to access the capital and funding it needs to continue doing the brilliant work that it has done for 40 years.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, is my noble friend the Minister aware of something that struck me as quite a striking feature of this report, which is that the chief executive of Channel 4 has had a 20% pay increase? Obviously, I look forward to the day when this is none of the Government’s business but, as long as we have the current arrangement, perhaps he would like to comment on the disparity between many viewers of Channel 4 dealing with real-terms pay cuts and what strikes me as an extreme level of high remuneration in this instance.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My noble friend is correct. The chief executive of Channel 4 received a 20% pay rise last year, taking her total salary to £1.2 million. That is twice the salary of the director-general of the BBC and more than the chief executive of ITV. Salaries are a matter for Channel 4 but I think this shows that the company is in rude health, one of the many things that make it an attractive asset to a potential buyer.

Channel 4 Privatisation

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Tuesday 5th April 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

Absolutely. The independent production sector has exploded since Channel 4 was created 40 years ago. The revenues have grown from £500 million in 1995 to £3 billion today. However, Channel 4’s competitors spend more on commissioning original programming than Channel 4 does—ITV spends twice as much and Netflix spends two and a half times as much in the UK. This is why we want to ensure that Channel 4 can borrow, invest and continue to support the independent sector, which it has done so much to support over the last four decades.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, ever since the announcement was made, we have been hearing about all these rare cultural gems which are made possible by the unique way in which Channel 4 is financed and which somehow would not be possible in a red in tooth and claw jungle capitalism. So I have just been looking at what the programming is now. With permission, I will tell your Lordships’ House: “Kitchen Nightmares”, “Undercover Boss”, “Steph’s Packed Lunch”, “Countdown”, “A Place in the Sun”, “A New Life in the Sun” and “Sun, Sea and Selling Houses”. Is it really credible to say that we are defending something which could not be provided by the private sector? Will my noble friend the Minister comment on the disparity between the funds which come from the private sector to independent production companies and those which come from state broadcasters?

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

I will not join my noble friend in singling out particular programmes —de gustibus non est disputandum, and all that. This is not about the content which Channel 4 currently produces or about its recent results; it is about ensuring that it is able, in the decades to come, to compete, invest and continue to provide a range of programming from which a range of people can benefit.

Young Audiences Content Fund: Replacement

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Thursday 17th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My Lords, the Young Audiences Content Fund and the Audio Content Fund have supported 220 hours of children’s television content and around 650 hours of radio content to date. We want to carry out the evaluation once the fund finishes at the end of this month and to see that as part of our wider strategic review of public service broadcasting. I cannot set out a precise timescale for the noble Lord, but we want to do that swiftly and thoroughly.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, if our creative industries are as successful as noble Lords on all sides have said, and if our audio-visual sector, including children’s content, is, as my noble friend the Minister says, world-beating, why does it need subsidy?

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My Lords, in public service broadcasting it is important that we provide for all the audiences that rely on it. Children of course do not have the same consumer power that adults do, and it is important that high-quality and distinctively British content is made for children in this country, particularly when there are so many other options for them to watch programmes from around the world, particularly from across the Atlantic. That is why it is right that we support public service broadcasting and make sure that the high-quality programming that we already enjoy can continue for generations to come.

Parthenon Marbles

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Tuesday 8th February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My Lords, the British Museum has more than 4.5 million objects from its collection that are available to study online. It is visited by 6 million people a year, and its fantastic collection from across human history is admired by people from around the world. Sadly, half of the original sculptures on the Parthenon are no longer with us, mostly destroyed by the turn of the 19th century, not least in the appalling tragedies sustained in 1687 when the Venetian army hit the Parthenon, which was being used as an armament store by the Ottoman Empire at the time. Of the half that remain, around half are in the British Museum, where they can be admired as part of the sweep of human civilisation, and about half can be admired in the Acropolis Museum, seen alongside the building which they once adorned.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, human society rests on the principles of private property, of free contract and of the elevation of the individual above the collective. Will my noble friend confirm that these precepts are incompatible with the concept of a collective claim based purely on geography?

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My noble friend makes an important point. The Parthenon sculptures were acquired by the late noble Earl, Lord Elgin, legally, with the consent of the then Ottoman Empire. The British Museum is always happy—and the trustees have made this clear—to consider loans to museums that recognise its legal ownership of the items. That is the stumbling-block in this instance.

Freedom of Speech

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Friday 10th December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, what a pleasure it is to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb. She and I met, somewhat implausibly, on the slopes of Mount Sinai some 30 years ago. She was then in a previous incarnation as an archaeologist. I like to think that we have been friends ever since. When I say friends, I do not mean that we are on nodding terms when we pass in the corridor; I mean that we are actual friends—we like each other. I do not think that I have ever felt the need to preface my remarks by saying, “Although we rarely agree” or “Although we have very different views”. It is odd that so many people feel the need to handle opponents with tongs in that way. It strikes me as both a belittling and a self-absorbed way of putting distance between people. Why on earth should we be expected to agree with our friends? Would it not have gone without saying for most of our recent history that you could have friends across the divide? No one would have thought it remarkable.

In 1644, John Milton wrote:

“Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.”


I cite the blind sage for two reasons. First, there is a certain karma in quoting him here: John Milton was no fan of the House of Lords, and he was no fan of the episcopacy in particular. Indeed, the man that Dr Johnson referred to as an “acrimonious and surly republican” was so against all kinds of authority that his libertarian principles spilled over even into his magnum opus, Paradise Lost, in which it is notable that the Almighty Himself gets some rather bad lines. It is as though Milton’s dislike of prelates and princes spilled over into a certain disdain even towards his creator.

But I also cite him for another reason: to ask your Lordships to dwell on the extraordinary fact that those words could have been uttered in 1644. How radical, revolutionary and earth-changing they must have seemed. Up until then, every civilisation had assumed that there was a supreme truth and that it was interpreted by some aristocratic or sacerdotal class. The idea that you could reach the truth by experimentation—by argument, trial and testing ideas—was extraordinary, and it was largely developed in the language in which you are now listening to these words. The phrase “civil liberty” dates from 1644, and it was a long time before any other tongue came up with an equivalent. In English, the phrase “liberty of conscience” dates from 1580.

I want to dwell on just how extraordinary it is that we moved away from this tribal ethic that had defined our entire existence as a species until then—the fundamental ethic of “my tribe good, your tribe bad”—to this idea that you could have a constant test and would get to the truth through a cacophony of different ideas.

Milton would have shared the most reverend Primate’s definition of whether it is “fitting” as well as “frank”; he made a great deal of the distinction between liberty and licence. For him, licence was giving in to your animal appetites; liberty was a virtuous application of reason, a kind of informed consent. When you had read up about the subject, you could make a free choice in a more intelligent way. “Knowledge”, he once wrote, is but “opinion in good men”. In other words, what people begin by putting forward as a radical idea becomes the accepted consensus if it turns out to be true: the good ideas drive out the false, over time.

This may sound terribly basic when I say it now, but I do not think it is. We have lived through this little bubble in which we have taken those ideas for granted. A lot of societies never got there; we did not until fairly recently. I wonder whether we might come to look back on recent years, the last two or three centuries, as a brief interglacial with long stretches of cold before and in front, when people went with certainty and tribal identification, rather than with the idea of piloting or trialling ideas, or letting others argue against them.

The primary duty of inculcating this rather difficult idea, of teaching people this counterintuitive thought that someone you do not like might still have something to tell you, that you do not know everything, that we all start from ignorance and can constantly refine our understanding, fell mainly on our educators. We needed constantly to habituate people to this way of thinking.

The great philosopher Hannah Arendt, the chronicler of the Eichmann trial, once wrote:

“Every generation, western civilisation is invaded by barbarians—we call them ‘children’.”


By that, she meant that you and I came into the world with pretty much the same mental and operational apparatus that we would have done 5,000 years ago. The reason that we do not live in the way that our ancestors lived then is because we are able to build culture—civilisation—on accumulated knowledge. We are able to do that because we accept empiricism, reason, the scientific method and the ability to test ideas, refine and improve them over time. And what worries me is that we are ceasing to do that. Not only our universities but our secondary schools are reverting to a much older heuristic of holding up identity, accident of birth and physiognomy above reason.

Over the summer I participated in teaching in a school, appropriately called the John Locke Institute. Rather like what the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Birmingham was describing in his home city, it tries to teach young people the idea of what the administrators of the course call “generous listening”. It is a lovely phrase. Generous listening means not waiting, patiently or impatiently, for the other person to stop speaking so that you can jump in. It means properly trying to engage with where they are coming from. If they use a loose word, do not pounce on it. Do not engage with their weakest argument; engage with their best argument.

The Oxford Union organised something they called “ideological Turing test debates”, where young people would be given a topical debate—should statues come down, should private schools be abolished—and you had to guess whether they really meant it. In other words, they had to master the other point of view well enough that they would have passed the Turing test and people would not have been able to tell whether they believed what they were saying. Is that not the sort of thing that all our schools and universities should be doing, in order to equip people to function in modern society? I fear that, when they do the opposite and say, “The most important thing about you is that you are female, white” or whatever it is, instead of teaching those countercyclical truths, they are teaching procyclical tribalism.

I close by citing—at some risk, in case she is watching —my elder daughter, of whom I am very proud. She is reading French and linguistics, and as a condition of being where she is at university, she was told that she needed to do an unconscious bias test. What does that have to do with French? Well, two hundred years ago, had she not been female and had been at the same university, as a condition of matriculation she would have been subject to the Test Act. She would have had to abjure the doctrine of transubstantiation: she would literally have had to swear an oath saying that she did not believe that the bread and wine in the Eucharist were the literal body and blood of our Lord. What has that got to do with French? As much or as little as the unconscious bias test—and if you cannot see that, you are in the matrix. In the 200 years between those two Test Acts flourished a free civilization. By heaven, we will miss it when it is gone.

BBC: Government Support

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Thursday 2nd December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, it is a huge honour and privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Bragg. I know that this is sometimes a pro forma that people say in these debates, but his has been a reassuring voice throughout my life: informing, educating and entertaining. He is a genuine polymath, as I discovered when I once appeared on his show on the anniversary of the Great Charter. He is one of those people who can take your special subject and argue as though it were also his. His has been a life of public service.

I do not think that anyone of us here would disagree with the strengths he has identified in our national broadcaster. The question is whether, as implied in the Motion for debate, these strengths depend on more government support and subsidy. Very often, government support, which is always well intentioned, ends up having a very different effect. There was a time in this country when it was thought that it was the role of government to install telephones, to manage airlines, to build cars. Those things did not work out very well —for the same reason that some of the rival broadcasters the noble Lord, Lord Bragg, mentioned are outperforming some of the older ones in audience share.

How do we preserve the strengths of our national broadcaster, while allowing it to enter into an age of streaming, Netflix, YouTube and all the other innovations? I do not think that my children are ever going to own a television set—it just is not how young people expect to watch programmes these days. To them, the idea of a poll tax on the population belongs—as it literally does—to a previous century. It made perfect sense when there was only one broadcaster. It is much more difficult to justify today.

There has always been a traditional attack on the BBC from some in my party on the grounds that it is biased, partial and so on. It is a line of reasoning that goes all the way back to Thomas Jefferson’s observation that it is sinful to force a man to furnish money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves. I hope it is still okay to quote the third President, as his statue is taken down in New York City Hall. He had some useful things to say about this, but that is not really my argument today. I do not think it matters nearly as much that the big, flagship news and current affairs programmes have been losing audience share. There is now a multiplicity of broadcasters. Out of the cacophony of differing interpretations, we can usually discern something close to the truth. We have that pluralism that is so necessary for impartiality. The problem is simply that we are trying to defend a 20th-century behemoth as though the technological changes of the last generation had not happened.

The question for the BBC is whether it can retrench and defend what it does well, rather than squandering its resources and capital defending things that are no longer sustainable. For example, do we really need a state broadcaster engaging in local radio? That area was perfectly well served by the private sector before. Do we need all these unbelievably unfunny comedy programmes on BBC2 and Radio 4? Are they a core part of what makes us a nation, shaped and defined by this relationship? Can we not retrench and make the line more defensible? We still have five or six years left of the existing funding system. I hope that figures within the corporation will use these years to think imaginatively about how to go with the changes, rather than being dragged kicking and screaming into the modern world. If there is a future for a state broadcaster, it will have to be more agile, cheaper and apter for the demands of our current age.

Public Service Broadcasting (Communications and Digital Committee Report)

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Thursday 27th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, mine will be a lonely voice in this debate. As my noble friend Lord Vaizey forecast, the note that I strike will be dissonant—indeed, given the tenor of your Lordships’ debate so far, not just dissonant but atonal, jarring and downright cacophonous. I must stand back and ask whether anybody, today, would propose funding one television and radio network with a poll tax on TV sets. That you would not invent something today is of course not a knock-down argument; I am enough of a Burkean conservative to see that. There are lots of things that we would not invent today but that we rather like, such as the use of French in diplomatic invitations; those resonant phrases about monarchy in the Book of Common Prayer, like shards left over from some ancient quarrel; or, indeed, the presence of hereditary legislators in the United Kingdom, who do such a disproportionate share of the unthanked and workaday tasks and who should stay, at least until the original deal is complied with. But I am not sure that the BBC is in that category.

A poll tax to fund one station made absolute sense when there was only one station. In 1922, it was very difficult to argue with, but even by 1955, when there were commercial alternatives, it was becoming difficult to justify in theory. Now, in an age of streaming, Netflix, Amazon Prime and YouTube, it has become unsustainable. The report that your Lordships are debating today took the figures up to 2018, and it is pretty clear that the lockdown has accelerated the trends that it identified.

There are a number of standard oppositional arguments levelled against the BBC: that you cannot justify the licence fee if you are trying to level up; that it is a poll tax on poor people; that the Bashir affair is part of what happens when an organisation is convinced of its rectitude because it is a public service dispenser; or that it is biased. I was surprised to hear the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, say that it was attacked by both sides and that this showed it was doing something right—I would have thought that, if you are being attacked by all sides, there is at least a case to be made that you are doing something wrong. It seems to me that you cannot have total impartiality in any broadcast or newspaper—one person’s idea of impartiality is another person’s idea of tendentiousness. The closest you can get, therefore, is to have a multiplicity or plurality of differing voices, so that out of a cacophony of clashing interpretations, the listener discerns something close to the truth.

The reality is that, as our viewing and listening habits shift, even within the corporation people are realising that change is coming. I do not think that the BBC has much to fear from change. We are creatures of habit, and there is such a thing as first-mover advantage. Thirty years after the privatisation of telecoms, BT was still by far the largest producer of landlines, with more than 40% of the market. The idea that, if the BBC moved to a subscription-only system, people would suddenly give up watching “Strictly”, “EastEnders”, or whatever programme they enjoy, just does not take account of human nature.

Some aspects of the corporation’s work may be unsustainable. For example, I never understood why the BBC needed to get into local radio—it struck me as an area already well-served by commercial operators. But the things that people regard as gems, and always bring up in these conversations—the Attenborough nature programmes and so on—are precisely the pieces of programming that would be profitable under any dispensation and that will continue to be export revenue-raisers for this country.

I finish by addressing those in the corporation who are capable of looking at reform positively. If this change is coming and technology is ineluctably moving this way, the only choice is to stand there and be pummelled by the waves or to scramble nimbly on to your board and try to ride them.

British Library Board (Power to Borrow) Bill

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 19th March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, it is always a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley of Knighton. His works here, like his earlier works, put me in mind of Yeats’s phrase about “Burke’s great melody”.

The next time you are in the vicinity of the British Library, I invite you to stand on the Euston Road and contrast two neighbouring buildings: the high, mute, forbidding walls of the British Library and the soaring, exquisite architecture of St Pancras station next door. I suggest that in that brickwork, we may descry something of the difference between public and private sectors.

I was for a long time a Member of the European Parliament, as were a large number of noble Lords on all sides. In fact, it is rather like Dover in Act V of “King Lear”: we have all ended up here, wherever we started. My noble friend Lord Vaizey challenged me to come out with a suitable quotation from our national poet. The obvious one, Polonius on borrowing, is singularly inept to our present debate, but how about Prospero in “The Tempest”:

"Me, poor man, my library

Was dukedom large enough”?


That seems apt for a debate about libraries in this Chamber.

Every time I passed through St Pancras station, it had an elevating and ennobling effect. We think of it as a heritage-y kind of building now, but it was cutting-edge in 1867, its roof the largest unsupported structure in the world at the time, a glorious work of wrought iron lattice. And next to it, the state-funded British Library, likened famously by the Prince of Wales to an academy for secret police. Although a case can be made for the spacious and comfortable reading rooms, the exterior, which is what most people see, is about as forbidding as it could be. Being a state-run and state-managed project, we find that a Bill passed in 1972 led to the final opening on that site in 1998, years behind schedule, hundreds of millions of pounds over budget and with more than 20,000 acknowledged design flaws, one of which was that there was not enough space for the books.

Whenever one makes a criticism of government management of any project, it is always assumed that one is critical of the thing itself. The early 19th-century French economist, Frédéric Bastiat said that whenever we say that education, healthcare or whatever it is should not be run by the government, we are accused of being against education, healthcare or whatever it is. Nothing could be further from the truth in this case. One of the happiest moments that I have spent in recent years was the time, six years ago, when all four surviving original copies of the Great Charter were gathered in one place in the British Library. In fact, I was looking at them with an expression of such awed lust that somebody surreptitiously photographed me and then posted the image on social media with the caption, “If Hannan gets his hands on all four copies of the Magna Carta, will he be like Sauron with the Ring?”.

So it is in a supportive spirit—breaking the consensus, if you like, as the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, suggested—that I ask whether it is really appropriate in this age for the Government to run a library, any more than it is for a Government to operate an airline, install a telephone or build cars.