Museums

Lord Sawyer Excerpts

Tuesday 15th November 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sawyer (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Royall for initiating this important debate and I pay tribute to her excellent work in chairing the People’s History Museum. I also thank the director and staff of the museum for their outstanding work and contribution to forwarding the case of learning about British history. I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Monks, for the time that he spent as chair of the museum and for his continued commitment and support; I hope that the Government listen carefully to the case that he makes tonight to make sure that we have no detrimental effects to the future of this great museum.

What I have always loved about the museum—and I can go back to the days when it was a small place in the east of London—is that it celebrates and promotes a great tradition, not one of kings and queens and the rich and powerful but of working people from all walks of life, including their experience, trials, tribulations, aspirations and most of all their achievements. They are there, forming a rich tapestry in this excellent and outstanding museum. I also love how it reaches out to its community; it does not just educate and inform, although it does that well, but encourages its visitors in innovative and exciting ways. It challenges people and makes them think; it brings the past to life and makes it relevant for today’s generation. As has been said in the debate, other museums do that work well, including the Black Country Living Museum and the highland museum.

My own personal passion after the People’s History Museum is the Beamish Museum, which is in my home county of Durham, an excellent place. Lives from the past come to life in an exciting and vibrant way; streets and communities have been recreated and transport runs as it was in days of yore. I had the great pleasure to give part of a library belonging to a famous Durham miners’ leader, which I brought down from the north-east 30 years ago, having found it in a junk shop. I had been looking for a good home for it ever since, and I am pleased to say that it has ended up in Beamish Museum, where I am looking forward to going to see it on the shelves of one of the houses there.

I also very much support and like the Working Class Movement Library. If there is an issue about needing to reach out, perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, and I could have a look at this together and see whether we can improve things there, because libraries and museums have to reach out. They cannot be isolated —they cannot go down one track; they have to broaden out and be relevant to more and more communities and to various people in communities. I would be happy to do that with the noble Lord, Lord Balfe. The Working Class Movement Library was built with the wages of a trade union official and his teacher wife, Eddie and Ruth Frow. It now serves not just the community in Manchester, but students from all across the world. It is a marvellous institution. The library shows how much the explosion of the written word and its eventual availability to ordinary people actually changed the world. Nothing could be more exciting, or more worth keeping and securing than that.

When we visit these museums or libraries we see how our forebears, despite poverty, unemployment and all manner of hardship, held values and believed in principles which forged institutions like the trade union, the churches and the friendly societies and enabled the promotion of those values and principles to spread out to a wider community. It is not so easy to do that today. Rampant consumerism, economic dislocation, reality TV, and the communication of disrespect—or even hatred—at the press of a button are only some of the things that have changed the landscape from the time when these values were first promoted. Today, as we open the doors of our museums and libraries and our fellow citizens in their more individualistic, fragmented and often isolated lives file past the displays and take part in activities, I hope they can be inspired to think about what their forebears achieved and how they did it. I hope that some of the values and principles that were passed on to me as an apprentice on a factory floor 60 years ago can at least be understood. The question is: is it possible that they can be used again to support positive social and economic advance?

They say that the past is no guide to the future. In today’s world that certainly looks to be true, but the underlying principles of community, social inclusion, respect for each other, kindness from and towards all men and women, regardless of their status, race or religion, might be hard to win today but are surely worth fighting for. The lessons from our museums are that we can see how that can be done. Much of what we see in our people’s museums and libraries shows the very best principles in action. As a consequence, they can and will enhance people’s lives today. That is why they must be supported and promoted.