Arts: Impact of Brexit

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Thursday 11th October 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to support my noble friend Lord Bragg. We are close to each other for many reasons: we are both grammar school boys from the county of Cumberland; and I have the great pleasure of representing on Cumbria County Council his hometown, Wigton, of which he is not just a distinguished son but already, in his lifetime, the patron saint. When my noble friend gets up to speak about something like this, I believe the nation will listen. Just as millions listen to his radio programmes every week, so too should the Government listen to what he has so ably set out as the threat to the cultural sector posed by Brexit. I will not pretend to be an expert on the cultural sector; I will try to talk about why I think the Government’s policy on Brexit has got us into the situation of threatening this vital sector.

We have heard a lot in recent weeks, with virtually nothing else in the media, about Mrs May’s commitment to her Chequers deal. It has some merits, but it has one huge defect: that it completely ignores the service sector of the economy. As my noble friend Lord Bragg has explained, the service sector is the most vibrant part of Britain. How can we cast aside this most vibrant part of Britain without thinking about its future at all? For manufacturers, yes, Europe is their home market. But for artists and people working in the cultural field, Europe is their home stage, their home gallery, their home concert hall. If we do not think in terms of being part of a Europe in which they can fulfil their professional lives, there will be a huge loss. I would say to anyone, including members of my own party in the other place, that if you think you are doing a good job of preventing a hard Brexit by supporting Mrs May’s Chequers deal, remember who you are forgetting—you are forgetting the large sector of the economy that is dependent on services.

My second point is that fundamental to the success of this sector is the thing most despised by many people about our membership of the European Union: the principle of freedom of movement. Surely it is time for all of us in leadership positions to start explaining to the British people why freedom of movement is not only a wonderful thing in itself, in the freedoms that it gives to people, but it is essential to their professional and artistic fulfilment. It is high time that we tried to change the debate about Brexit.

There will be a lot of talk—I am sure that we will hear this in the Minister’s response—about visas and how a visa regime can substitute for the absence of freedom of movement. I am a bit sceptical about whether that is so. An awful lot of people who work in the cultural sector would not qualify in terms of their salary for the kind of special treatment that the Government seem to envisage. This is a fundamental point. When you are young in the creative sector, you are not earning over £30,000 per year—you are probably not earning £20,000 per year—yet you need that ability to accept the job opportunity that comes up in Lyon at two days’ notice.

Let us hear from the Government how they propose to address this. My view is that there is no means of addressing it other than stopping the madness of Brexit. By stopping the madness of Brexit, we will not only strike a blow at the negative English nationalism that lies behind the leave vote—that is what a lot of it was: negative English nationalism. We will be striking a blow for the future of our country, for tolerance, diversity, being full participants in European culture; that is what, in the remaining weeks, we now have to do.