Creative Industries: Creating Jobs and Productivity Growth

Lord Berkeley of Knighton Excerpts

Thursday 6th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley of Knighton (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord; what welcome news we have just heard. We have already heard three extremely potent speeches and I agree with everything that has been said. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, for this debate. I shall be picking up on David Hockney, and emphasise, without going into it any further, the importance of copyright and AI. To creative people such as me—I declare an interest as a composer—that is fundamental to carrying on our existence.

Like other speakers today, I want to celebrate what is good and wonderful in the UK. In so doing, I hope to emphasise what needs protecting and supporting. On which subject, I look forward to all the maiden speeches but particularly that of the noble Lord, Lord Brennan, who has done such fantastic work in the other place on behalf of music. I really look forward to hearing his maiden speech and working with him in future.

As I just said, we have in the UK an abundance of creative talent but it needs nurturing, especially at the grass-roots level. That is why I ask the Minister to look carefully at the plight of small venues up and down the country, where emerging talent can be fostered. Let us go to the other extreme: in a few days’ time at the Royal Opera House, we will hear a new opera, “Festen” by Mark-Anthony Turnage, one of our most acclaimed composers. It is this wonderful mix of the grass-roots level and the Royal Opera House, or no matter where it is, that we should celebrate and preserve.

In terms of preserving, the closure of university arts departments is a terrible worry. Most recently, it was the music department at Cardiff University. It followed in the wake of other universities, such as the University of East Anglia, which has such a splendid record in literature, with Ian McEwan, Angela Carter and Kazuo Ishiguro—a Nobel laureate, no less. He has now been joined by Abdulrazak Gurnah, a Tanzanian-British citizen.

Our dramatists and actors are second to none. I went to the Hampstead Theatre the other night to see Tom Stoppard’s “The Invention of Love”. Simon Russell Beale was magnificent as the ageing AE Housman. How lucky we are. In April, David Hockney, was has already been spoken about, will have the largest retrospective exhibition ever in Paris—some 400 pictures curated by Norman Rosenthal. So, there is much to celebrate but also, I fear, much to preserve. It is essential for artists to know the rules before they break them. This is something that Hockney always maintained: —that you need to be able to draw before you can paint. Funnily enough, His Majesty the King also believes very passionately in tradition and building on the lessons of the past. Whether you are an avant-garde artist or not, knowing those basics is essential.

That brings me on to why arts and music in schools are so crucial. This is the future generation who we hope will be able—once Brexit is amended—to tour Europe, who will be writing operas for the Royal Opera House, and who will have their music on the South Bank, but that is going to happen only if we put music back centre-stage in schools, hopefully on the curriculum but, if not, let us get peripatetic teachers to teach instruments. There are precious few instruments and even fewer teachers in state schools. I believe that music and the arts must not be the preserve of the rich. They must be open to everyone. That creates a more cohesive society. In my maiden speech 10 years or so ago, I mentioned a person in Wormwood Scrubs who was part of the Koestler Trust. I had managed to get a guitar to him, and he replied to me, “Thank you so much for this gift. If I had received this when I was 17 years old, I do not think I would be sitting here in Wormwood Scrubs serving a life sentence for murder”.