National Heritage Act 1983

Earl of Clancarty Excerpts

Thursday 13th October 2022 Grand Committee

[The Earl of Clancarty (CB)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, for his comprehensive introduction to this debate. I am very much in favour of looking at this legislation, but with certain caveats. I wonder whether a more top-down approach is required, as has been suggested and is happening in other European countries.

It is clear to me that it is absolutely right that certain artefacts should be returned to their country of origin, or at least something close to it, and the Horniman Museum, for one, has made the correct decision with regard to the Benin bronzes in its collection, but it is important that if legislation is to be changed, those changes should be restricted to the question of restitution only. We really have to make that point.

In this respect, I am mindful of the concerns expressed by Robert Hewison in the Apollo piece referred to in the excellent Library note we have on this debate. It would be hugely worrying if legislative changes made deaccessioning in the more general sense easier, for all the many reasons that deaccessioning is such a fraught area. It is so much influenced by personal whim, faddishness, misguided ideas about tidying up a collection and, of course, funding concerns. Restitution is a separate issue, and that needs to be clearly understood. It would thus be helpful if the Minister could outline where we currently stand legislation-wise with regard to these concerns. As has been mentioned, it is about not just the National Heritage Act but the British Museum Act 1963 and the Charities Act 2022 as well. That would be helpful.

When we raise these concerns in the House, we are repeatedly told by the Government that it is up to individual museums to make decisions about their collections even if, as in the cases of the BM and the V&A, their hands are very much tied. We have reached the stage, in the words of Tristram Hunt, of there being a ping-pong between central government and museums that really needs to stop.

This is also a government stance in stark contrast to that of other countries, including Germany and France. President Macron has made it very much a personal mission to return ownership of many African artefacts, notably from the Kingdom of Dahomey to the country of Benin—not the same Benin as of the Benin bronzes, which come from an area in present-day Nigeria. This top-down approach, which in effect is a national policy, allows such restitution to be seen very much as an opportunity for dialogue and co-operation between countries. In this case, French money is being put into the building of a museum, meaning that the work is returned to a safe environment, there is training of curators and much more besides. To be fair, of course we have our own significant museum-run programmes, and I am very grateful to the British Museum for furnishing me with details on those, which include work in Benin City on the site of the royal palace we destroyed in 1897.

None of this of course makes up for the original looting of such objects or indeed the accompanying destruction, sometimes of a whole nation and culture, something which Russia is now attempting in Ukraine. It does, however, acknowledge the reality of a shared history for those artefacts, and that has huge importance in itself. France is proving that an exchange in ownership is no bar to co-operation. I believe that our Government should spell this out as an opportunity for co-operation rather than continuing contestation, which is currently the Government’s default mode in too many areas. I believe that the word “contested” should become an obsolete term. It is certainly clear from the latest YouGov poll on the Parthenon sculptures that public opinion has moved way ahead of the Government on that issue, with 59% in favour of return and only 18% against. The ball is very much in the Government’s court.