Arts

Lord Wood of Anfield Excerpts

Thursday 1st February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wood of Anfield (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a member of the board of the Royal Court Theatre. When I was first appointed to your Lordships’ House, the first reaction of one of my oldest friends was: “Oh wow, that’s amazing. Does that mean you get to meet Melvyn Bragg?”. I cannot think of anyone else whose cultural appetite spans so widely, yet whose passion is always tethered to the values of incessant curiosity and intellectual rigour.

Another thing I associate with my noble friend Lord Bragg is the belief that art and culture should be available to everyone, whatever their background—a statement that sounds trite, perhaps, until you unpack what it says about a country and a culture when it stops being true. It is rare that someone steps out and says, “Art should only be for the privileged few”. But the problem is that that is precisely what happens in a country that lets the open, democratic contract at the heart of arts and culture slip away—a country, sadly, a bit like ours.

This is what happens when you see the arts not as a staple of what makes for a good life but as a luxury that can no longer be afforded—the “cherry on the cake” misnomer, as my noble friend Lord Bragg said. It leads to nearly £1 billion cut from local government spending on the arts in the last 15 years—a 30% real-terms cut in public funding for the arts since 2010. It is accompanied by a view that the arts are the plaything of the metropolitan elites. It tethers political grievance directly to our cultural institutions—to our media, whose integrity gets constantly questioned; and to our arts institutions, which are portrayed as enjoyed only by the champagne swillers. It leads to a Culture Minister who did not even know that Channel 4, one of her party’s boldest innovations, was not taxpayer funded.

In education, it continues with the prejudice that science is an investment but arts are a hobby—that arts and culture are a private good, not a public one. Arts courses at universities are repeatedly challenged for their economic value, their academic merit and even their political acceptability. Unsurprisingly, these courses then get whittled away. Cash-strapped and curriculum-overloaded schools become less able to offer supplementary arts and music options, or even core arts and music options, for their students. Over time, as many noble colleagues have said, the values of empathy, curiosity, sensitivity and openness become associated with elitism, privilege, weakness and even being a “snowflake”.

What is the consequence of this financial and cultural chipping away at the arts? It means that children’s access to arts is radically reduced, arts institution cuts that were temporary in bad times become the new normal, and thousands of freelance workers who depend on the arts, and who are not often mentioned, find their careers totally unsustainable.

It is no surprise, then, that in Britain today, people who grow up in professional families are four times more likely than those with working-class parents to be working in the creative industries. One of our leading actresses, Dame Helen Mirren, warns that acting is becoming the preserve of the rich. Thus, the prejudices of many of those who neglect and starve the arts are perversely vindicated.

The price we all pay for this is not just young people with less exposure to the arts, and who are less enriched by them; it is not just growing inequality in access to what should be a daily staple for everyone in our country. It is also that the quality of our democracy is undermined, because our arts are at the heart of freedom of expression, solidarity, debate and disagreement accompanied by civility.

Arts make us all better citizens, which is why we all need access, continued exposure and participation in the arts. More than anything else, this is why, whatever happens politically in the decade ahead, we must all, whatever our party and our preferences, call time on the neglect, austerity, politicisation and prejudice towards our arts that I fear has become part of daily life in the past decade.