British Library Board (Power to Borrow) Bill

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 19th March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, it is always a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley of Knighton. His works here, like his earlier works, put me in mind of Yeats’s phrase about “Burke’s great melody”.

The next time you are in the vicinity of the British Library, I invite you to stand on the Euston Road and contrast two neighbouring buildings: the high, mute, forbidding walls of the British Library and the soaring, exquisite architecture of St Pancras station next door. I suggest that in that brickwork, we may descry something of the difference between public and private sectors.

I was for a long time a Member of the European Parliament, as were a large number of noble Lords on all sides. In fact, it is rather like Dover in Act V of “King Lear”: we have all ended up here, wherever we started. My noble friend Lord Vaizey challenged me to come out with a suitable quotation from our national poet. The obvious one, Polonius on borrowing, is singularly inept to our present debate, but how about Prospero in “The Tempest”:

"Me, poor man, my library

Was dukedom large enough”?


That seems apt for a debate about libraries in this Chamber.

Every time I passed through St Pancras station, it had an elevating and ennobling effect. We think of it as a heritage-y kind of building now, but it was cutting-edge in 1867, its roof the largest unsupported structure in the world at the time, a glorious work of wrought iron lattice. And next to it, the state-funded British Library, likened famously by the Prince of Wales to an academy for secret police. Although a case can be made for the spacious and comfortable reading rooms, the exterior, which is what most people see, is about as forbidding as it could be. Being a state-run and state-managed project, we find that a Bill passed in 1972 led to the final opening on that site in 1998, years behind schedule, hundreds of millions of pounds over budget and with more than 20,000 acknowledged design flaws, one of which was that there was not enough space for the books.

Whenever one makes a criticism of government management of any project, it is always assumed that one is critical of the thing itself. The early 19th-century French economist, Frédéric Bastiat said that whenever we say that education, healthcare or whatever it is should not be run by the government, we are accused of being against education, healthcare or whatever it is. Nothing could be further from the truth in this case. One of the happiest moments that I have spent in recent years was the time, six years ago, when all four surviving original copies of the Great Charter were gathered in one place in the British Library. In fact, I was looking at them with an expression of such awed lust that somebody surreptitiously photographed me and then posted the image on social media with the caption, “If Hannan gets his hands on all four copies of the Magna Carta, will he be like Sauron with the Ring?”.

So it is in a supportive spirit—breaking the consensus, if you like, as the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, suggested—that I ask whether it is really appropriate in this age for the Government to run a library, any more than it is for a Government to operate an airline, install a telephone or build cars.