Cultural Objects (Protection from Seizure) Bill

Danny Kruger Excerpts

Report stage
Friday 28th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Danny Kruger (Devizes) (Con)]

I congratulate, in particular, my right hon. Friend the Member for Central Devon (Mel Stride). In a sense the Bill is very technical, simply extending a law that is already in force, but it is seems significant at a time when our country is going through a period of great change.

Earlier, Mr Speaker objected to a reference to global Britain, suggesting that that was some sort of party political point. I do not think it is. Surely, even Opposition Members believe in the UK playing a successful role in the world, and I think it matters enormously that we are doing this; it is an important signal of our commitment to global exchange.

I hope that it is not just because he is the Chair of the Treasury Committee that my right hon. Friend is promoting the Bill. There have been lots of references to the boost to GDP from our role as a place of cultural exchange; my hon. Friend the Member for East Surrey (Claire Coutinho) also made the pounds, shillings and pence argument, rather depressingly. It is a fair point—£75 billion is not to be sneezed at—but surely, the real value of what we are proposing and, I hope, voting through today is the value of cultural exchange. It is a great thing. My hon. Friend the Member for South Cambridgeshire (Anthony Browne), who is also on the Treasury Committee, made the point that at a time of tension with Russia and China, increasing the opportunities for exchange of cultural objects with those countries matters enormously.

While I enthuse about the role of the UK, and particularly of the London museums, as a meeting place for the world’s artefacts, surely the real value of the United Kingdom in the cultural sphere lies in our local museums. I echo the point made by the hon. Member for Leeds North West (Alex Sobel) about the importance of regional museums. My hon. Friends the Members for Hertford and Stortford (Julie Marson) and for East Surrey made the same point about their local museums. Those were good efforts, but surely the Wiltshire Museum is the one to mention. We have in Devizes the museum that houses the oldest artefacts in the United Kingdom. We talk about the terracotta soldiers and Tutankhamun’s tomb and the Elgin marbles, but those are flashily new objects—box fresh—by comparison with the Neolithic artefacts that were dug out of the long barrow at East Kennett and, of course, our great stone circles at Stonehenge and Avebury, which are 5,000 years old.

I welcome the renewed focus on the United Kingdom as a place of cultural exchange, and I hope to welcome the terracotta army to Devizes at some point.