Cultural Property (Armed Conflicts) Bill [HL]

Baroness Wheatcroft Excerpts

Monday 6th June 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wheatcroft (Con)]

My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to join all other speakers in this debate in welcoming the Bill. After having listened to so many well-informed speeches, I shall be brief, rather than repeating everything that has been said.

Cultural heritage provides a literal way of touching the past. It is a tangible demonstration of what binds a people together. In the aftermath of conflict, heritage offers a force to help rebuild communities. That, of course, is why extremists are so keen to wreak the havoc that we are currently seeing in Syria—to damage the civilisations that have gone before, and leave no trace. That is why we need to act. We can protect the world’s cultural heritage to a certain extent, despite the difficulties that the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, listed, and this Bill is an important step in that direction.

Ratifying the Hague convention and its two protocols, the second of which is the crucial one, is an important step. Crucially, the reciprocity that we will achieve in signing these documents enables us also to protect our own cultural heritage and lift it to the enhanced protection level. The UNESCO committee that has to decide what qualifies for enhanced protection has no easy task; as noble Lords have heard, only five countries have had their heritage sites approved so far. I am not sure that everybody would agree with what goes on to that list. The city of Baku in Azerbaijan may be straightforward, but maybe not everybody would see the Neolithic flint sites in Belgium as worthy of enhanced protection. But what creates cultural heritage is what the people who live in those cultures believe. While we can hope that there will never be another armed conflict on this island again, it would be foolish for us not to seek to safeguard our own cultural heritage as far as we can. Ratifying these treaties takes us along that way.

I am happy to declare my own interests as deputy chairman of the British Museum. The museum likes to be known as a museum of the world and for the world, and it is clear, to me at least, that it must fulfil the first criterion for enhanced protection. It is a site of the greatest importance to humanity. Yet just a few days ago the museum was forced to close its doors to visitors from home and abroad. The reason? Protesters from Greenpeace. We were advised that what they were doing would put our visitors in danger, and we had no option but to turn them away—some people who had come a short distance and some who had travelled across continents. I support the right to protest, but I do not support the right of any group, however strongly they might feel, to force a site of cultural heritage to close its doors to the public. I hope that noble Lords will agree with me on that.

The Government’s support for this Bill is evidence of their support for cultural heritage, and we all applaud that. The £30 million cultural protection fund, of which there has already been mention this afternoon, is testimony to the work that is going to be done and already is taking place. The £3 million fund that the British Museum is currently working with Iraq on is going to make a huge difference. We are training up teams of Iraqis so that, when they are able, they can go back to their home country and begin to rebuild their damaged heritage.

I will conclude my remarks by quoting Jonathan Tubb, the British Museum’s keeper in the department of the Middle East. He said, in response to the fund:

“Thanks to DCMS we can at last do more than monitor from afar the relentless assault on Iraq’s cultural heritage”.

That has to be good news.