Economy: Creative Industries

Lord Inglewood Excerpts

Thursday 18th June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Inglewood (Con)]

My Lords, what we have heard in the Chamber this afternoon, since my noble friend Lady Wheatcroft initiated this debate, proves that it is axiomatic that the creative activities of this country are central to our economic well-being. As the noble Viscount, Lord Colville, said, this has been enhanced by the applications of digital technology

Having started there, I think that the next question we need to ask is: what are we, as a society, going to do about that? While it is very easy to talk about creativity, it is sometimes perhaps a bit less obvious exactly what we mean by it. In my assessment, it entails two elements —an imaginative and interesting mind, coupled with an ability to express what that mind wants to convey. The question we then have to ask ourselves is this: is our education system achieving that for the next generation? I am no expert on education, which has never been a political topic on which I have any great expertise, but it is my impression—and, regrettably, this has been confirmed by someone in your Lordships’ House who knows a lot about it—that increasingly there is a tick-in-the-box, results-led framework around what is happening. It seems that the ghost of Mr Gradgrind is fingering the collar of successive Secretaries of State, and I believe that that is bad for creativity.

Another instance of the kind of thing that concerns me is the teaching of history. As far as I can see, history is increasingly being presented to the children of this country as being a combination of the Romans and the Holocaust. If one tries to imagine one’s perspective of the wider world based principally on those two points, a very strange picture emerges.

In the context of a discussion on creativity and the creative industries, one of the absolutely central things is to appreciate that failure is both inevitable and important. Second chances are especially important. We have simply got to avoid being too hidebound by formal qualifications in response to some kind of actual or moral audit that may surround in particular the early stages of these activities. Ability and potential are far more important than the qualifications which have been acquired. What matters is the potential to achieve something interesting and great and valuable for the future.

That being the case, the culture of the society we live in is important. Is it the case that we British people collectively value the attributes which are the seedbed of creativity in our society? I am afraid that if we look at society’s general attitude towards museums, concert halls, art galleries, architecture and landscape, we probably do not. Yet, if we listen to the evidence presented to us by my noble friend Lady Wheatcroft or read the essays published recently by Sir Peter Bazalgette of the Arts Council, it is increasingly clear that these things really do matter. But so frequently what is often reflected in various parts of the press is the fact that we Brits pride ourselves on being plain people who know what we like, and we do not like that fancy stuff. That is a very bad context for encouraging creativity more widely. While I would never stand up in your Lordships’ House and commend the French way of managing the economy, I do think that the French attitude to culture is one that we could emulate to our advantage in this country.

Potentially for the economy, it is just as important for people to go to art and drama colleges and music schools as it is for them to train to be accountants. After all, we should remember that when Dr Johnson was looking at Thrale’s brewery before it was to be sold, he commented that you were not simply looking at vats and furnaces, but at,

“the potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice”.

Are we as a society training people properly for the creative industries? My guess is that we are not.

I want to touch on one particular instance which arose earlier in the debate: the discussions on the future of the BBC. Over the past few years I have done quite a lot of work in and around television and the media, and there is a wide range of opinion about the role and place of the BBC in the creative economy. What is interesting is that I have never heard anyone demur from the proposition that the BBC fills a very important role in training people in the sector who then go on to do great things in the non-public areas of television and broadcasting. If the BBC is demolished for whatever reason, that training function will be lost unless it is specifically reinstated, and it is self-evident that that is not in the national interest.

What else could be potentially damaging to the creative industries? We need to be on our guard against the pernicious influence of conventional wisdom and political correctness, because they can and do get in the way of imagination and important contributions. I am thinking about this in the context of the present furore surrounding the remarks of Sir Tim Hunt, a man I have never met and know nothing about, and I do not think I understand what his great achievement was. However, it reminds me of the debate when Galileo suggested that the universe was not organised in quite the way the Roman Catholic Church would have us believe. Against that background, Sir Tim Hunt is a Nobel prize winner. Is there anyone in your Lordships’ House who would not swap their peerage for a Nobel prize? Is there anyone sitting in this Chamber who has not on occasion said something silly or done something that perhaps they would rather they had not? I do not think so. What Sir Tim Hunt did was to say something silly and foolish, which I am sure on a moment’s reflection he regrets deeply, but is the response of University College London and the Royal Society right? The peccadillo he committed is far less than the peccadillo they have committed, and I hope personally that he will be reinstated to the positions he held before. In this House we are quite rightly concerned to look at our rules of self-regulation and we exclude those who have served prison sentences, but there is no suggestion that those who commit parking offences should be expelled. We must be on our guard against political correctness and conventional wisdom.

It has also been mentioned that people in the creative world are often rather difficult. I am sure that that is right. Here in Parliament we live in a world where the whips exercise great influence and power. Almost by definition, the people who are some of the greatest contributors to the creative world are those who are the most difficult and whose way of life perhaps might be criticised by, to pluck an example, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Were Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, to name just two, people whose other activities made them easy to deal with? The answer is no, and while not every difficult person is a great artist, nevertheless sometimes we have to accept that that is the way God made us all.

Finally, let us remember that a vast amount of the output of the creative industries is, let us be clear about it, pretty good rubbish, but that is the price we pay for works of genius. There is a process of sifting and elimination, and we should not criticise because a certain amount of what is made by the creators in our society is either not to our taste or, frankly, pretty meretricious. If you do not have all that, you will not get the gems either.

The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, touched on the fact that it is important that those who achieve something get the rewards to which they are entitled. I should comment in parenthesis that my wife is a retired photographer, so I have a slight first-hand experience of this. It is important that the rules on intellectual property should reward properly those who have made a contribution.

In a completely different way, I should declare that I am involved in hill farming, I am the chairman of the Cumbria Local Nature Partnership and president of the Uplands Alliance. My home area, like that of the noble Lord, Lord Bragg, has been nominated by this country to UNESCO to be recognised as a world heritage site because of its importance as a cultural landscape. That is self-evident because it is difficult to conceive of the Romantic poets without the Lake District. As we speak, some farms in the heads of the dales are closing down and going out of business because the returns are simply such that people are not prepared to go on. If we want a creative industry, we have to make sure that the people who are doing things that matter and make a contribution can make a livelihood from so doing.

In a world where the underlying economic approach to government seems to be dominated by 19th century concepts of political economy, I have always been slightly amused—I was a junior Minister in the Department of National Heritage some 20 years ago—by the relationship between politicians and artists. It is a rather uncomfortable one and it has always brought up a wry smile in me because they are not natural bedfellows. Nevertheless, it is important to recognise that wealth in this country and in the contemporary world is not calibrated simply in pounds and pence, rather it is that if you approach these matters in a slightly more relaxed way, you end up creating a lot more money than otherwise you would have done, for the benefit of everyone.