Government Support for Artists

Viscount Falkland Excerpts

Monday 19th January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Falkland (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, am grateful to my noble friend Lord Clancarty. As the noble Baroness said, he keeps the arts alive in your Lordships’ Chamber and I am glad that that is so. I say that rather ruefully because when I was a member of the Liberal Democrats, which was by and large a very enjoyable time, it was not easy to deal with the arts in the way that I should have liked—as a spokesman I was mostly talking about gambling, drink and other matters. As a Cross-Bencher, I hope that I may be able to be freer in my remarks.

I shall not follow the noble Earl down the road of individual support for artists. He was admirably answered by the noble Lord, Lord Patten, who gave us some very constructive views and interesting comparisons with other countries.

I say to the noble Earl that it is true and obvious that the arts win no votes in elections. I do not think that there will be many debates on the doorsteps of England and Scotland on the arts policy of the particular party which is at the front door talking to them—it is just a fact of life. People take for granted the excellence of our arts in this country. We perform enormously well with all the hurdles—in fact, one could argue that artists do terribly well because of the hard road that they follow in whichever field that it may be, be it the world of music, ballet, opera, dance or film, so it is something that we can be very proud of.

Returning to the Liberal Democrats—I am not trying to get back or anything—I think that Mr Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, was terribly good yesterday on “The Andrew Marr Show”, not least because he managed to fight his way through the constant interruptions, which certainly his predecessors on that programme and the other leaders failed to do. That may augur well for the television debates, if they should take place—it may be why the Prime Minister does not want to be wiped off the floor again by Mr Clegg. Mr Clegg said one thing yesterday which interests me, and that is the party’s commitment to literacy—which is vital, and the uses of literacy, of course, to use the title of Hoggart’s book—but it does not go far enough. If you think about it and you go to museums in London, you will find that they are always full—our museums and galleries are terrific—but you do not see many of our indigenous people there; they are mostly tourists and people who come here to go to them. This suggests to me that something is wrong with our education, and it is on education that I want to concentrate in the short time available to me.

We are closing avenues into the creative arts to young people. It is scandalous that we have exclusions from school at the current level. It is not the business of state education or the academies to decide that disruptive students and students who come from poor backgrounds and are troublesome—although one sympathises with the teachers—should be excluded. A lot of troublesome people become very good artists, as everyone in the Chamber knows. In my youth, I worked as a theatrical agent. Every day of my life, I worked with troublesome people, clever people and talented people. My children are mostly in the arts. My daughter teaches excluded children. She teaches them to think up stories and then to make a four to five-minute film. Some of those children had been in detention and in terrible trouble. The results have been remarkable.

That is my message tonight for the noble Earl: it is education that we need to attack first of all, because we are cutting out the chances for a lot of talented people to emerge.