Arts

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Thursday 1st February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh (Lab)]

My Lords, I too begin my comments by thanking my noble friend Lord Bragg for introducing this fascinating subject with great eloquence and passion.

I want to do two things. The first is to ask the question: what are arts? The question we are debating is: what is the contribution of the arts to the economy and to society? That raises two questions—arts and contribution—and I will say something on them both.

We have talked about arts for a long time, but I am not entirely sure what we mean by them. Some might ask whether sport is an art. Is cricket an art? Is billiards an art? What can one say? What would be the answer of those who were silenced by Mrs Thatcher, who was interrogating this, to the question of what snooker or cricket’s contribution to the economy or society is?

The first thing to do is to be clear about the arts but, since I cannot do this here, I will do it in my classroom. I simply say that art refers to an imaginative reconstruction of an object or activity. One creates an object and its bears one’s imprint on it. Through that imprint, one makes it distinctively one’s object and it can give a lot of pleasure to others.

The next question is far more important—contribution. The contribution of the arts can be at many levels. One can produce millions of DVDs, sell them and say that this is the contribution of the arts, but is this our interest here? We are interested in what is distinctive in the contribution of art, not just what is incidental but what is intrinsic to it. Art cannot be imagined without those contributions and we cannot imagine those contributions from any activity other than art, in any society.

I want to concentrate—because I think it is very important—on the distinctive contributions of art to any society, without which it is not really worth living in. I point to four contributions that art makes. First, it gives you self-knowledge. Art gives a society some understanding of what it is, the deeper forces working within it, and the deeper contradictions and self-knowledge.

Secondly, art points out the defects of society in an intelligent and meaningful way. It does not lecture and say, “You should be doing this”, but rather it subtly gets under your skin and points out what the defect is and how it needs to be rectified. That is why, for example, “Cathy Come Home” or “Mr Bates vs The Post Office” had enormous impact. You ask why, if this had been going on for all those years, nobody was moved? Why did we have to wait so long, until a 45-minute programme came along? My guess is that it is because art unsettles you. If you asked the millions of people who saw it and were influenced by it what moved them, they would give you all kinds of answers that refer to the internal mechanism of the human mind, which the art was able to touch.

Thirdly, art creates a community. For example, a novelist represents characters from different communities and introduces them to each other. If I do not know how a worker lives his life, by reading Dickens I begin to get a picture of how that person works.

Fourthly, and finally, as Toni Morrison said, art is my access to me—an entrance into my own inner life. By reading about art and people like me, I begin to understand myself. What more self-knowledge can there be than art? Religion is supposed to be the source of out self-knowledge: God alone knows us . The artist certainly does that: he holds a mirror to us and gives us some idea of who we are. A society lucky with its artists is a society that has a great contribution to make.

Brexit: Movement of People in the Cultural Sector (European Union Committee Report)

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Wednesday 15th May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to participate in a debate led by the noble Lord, Lord Jay. Many people have expressed anxiety that Brexit will have a negative impact on the cultural sector of this country. It will cut us off from our European roots, it will make Britain inward-looking and it will take away the incentives provided by international comparison. For all these reasons, there is a deep fear that Brexit will be damaging to our country in cultural terms. I share some of those anxieties, but I want to probe a little deeper to explain why I think these consequences might come about.

If you defend Brexit on the grounds that we need to get out of the European Union to control our borders and thus the kind and number of people coming into this country, obviously you are saying that immigration control is the central motive for it. Therefore, if that is one of the main reasons for Brexit, once it takes place, it is the criterion by which it will be judged. Let us imagine our country once Brexit has taken place. People will say, “No, it hasn’t gone far enough. You haven’t executed it properly”. Why is that? “People are still coming here from France, Germany and Italy”. Who are the custodians of that society? Who makes up the vanguard of the revolution that Brexit has created? They are the people who said that the point of Brexit is to control immigration. As long as Brexit is defended in such language, it is inevitable that it will involve controlling immigration, often wrongly. There will be constant pressure on controlling immigration and our lives will be that much the poorer for it.

Therefore, if I was a Brexiteer, which I am not, I would want to make the case for Brexit on different grounds—the opposite grounds; namely, that the point of Brexit is to make Britain open to the world so that we can walk into the world and the world can walk into Britain. It is because we do not want to be limited to the European Union that we want to execute Brexit. My argument would be made in terms of openness. If you make that kind of argument, it becomes easier to say to the people post Brexit, “Let these people come in because this is why we got out of the European Union”. In other words, I want to warn people against making the case for Brexit. Unless they are careful, they will create a lot of problems, not only in cultural but in other spheres.

I want to make another point, which is just as important. The cultural life of our country matters to us a great deal. Our culture defines us as a particular kind of community. It is far more of a source of revenue than some other, more material, industries. It is also a source of soft power that allows us to punch above our weight. This is what we have been able to achieve as a result of our culture, so the point is that our reputation as one of the cultural centres of the world should not be compromised or undermined.

That means asking certain questions. How does a culture flourish? If British culture is to flourish and make an impact, what are the preconditions? I shall move on here to argue that immigration in one form is central to culture. Culture implies the fusion of sensibilities—constantly being exposed to new ideas and interacting with them. Where will those new ideas come from? Let us look at our own country. When we consider any of the academic disciplines with which I have been involved, such as philosophy or science, they have benefited from the presence of a sizeable number of immigrants. It is the same in the field of art and other areas. If immigration is central to culture, one cannot blindly say that all forms of immigration must be restricted.

This leads to another question: if you accept my argument that immigration is central to culture, what kind of restriction can you put on immigration? When can you say, “Look, we will have too many people”, or, “We will not have people of the following kind”? One needs to bear in mind the specificity of culture: it is the kind of area in which restrictions on immigration must take a particular form.

Let us take two issues that have come up time and again. First, many artists are self-employed—certainly in the field of music, where we are the second-largest exporter. They work for a little while then need to go to some other European countries to work; that is how they earn their living. How will these self-employed artists function if there are restrictions limiting them to one country or another? Multi-country, multi-entry visas will need to be easily available for these people.

Secondly, if you were to insist that anybody who comes in must have a certain amount of income—£23,000, £30,000 or whatever—you are again imposing a criterion that will not be met by the artist, because artists’ wages are lower than the national median. If you say that an artist coming from Europe must have an income of £30,000, you are asking for the impossible. These are the kinds of consideration we would need to take into account, because they are specific to culture. If, therefore, we have occasion to restrict immigration in the cultural sphere, these are the criteria by which we can do that.

The third important criterion has to do with the kind of skills this country requires. You cannot abstractly say that we have too many people and do not want more. You have to make an assessment of the kind of skills your country requires now and later, and then ask yourself how to encourage those skills. Many people have rightly expressed the anxiety that in the desire to stop immigration or to stop people coming here, we will starve ourselves of the kind of skills we badly need—for example, heritage skills. Lots of old buildings need restoration—whether it is Buckingham Palace or Parliament—and we need people with those skills; we do not have them in sufficient supply in this country. This is the third criterion: we need a total assessment of the kind of skills we require and to make sure our cultural policy fits into that.