Arts and Creative Industries Strategy

Viscount Stansgate Excerpts

Thursday 8th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Stansgate (Lab)]

My Lords, I am pleased to take part today and make a brief contribution. I begin by thanking my noble friend Lord Chandos for securing the debate and for the way in which he introduced it; I acknowledge all the expertise that he brings to bear. Of course, the same is true for so many other speakers in this debate. Before I begin, I ought to declare my interests; I have decided on two. First, I am the president of the Parliamentary and Scientific Committee. Secondly, tonight, I hope to be able to go and see a live Royal Ballet production that will be streamed to a cinema—one of the ways in which ballet and opera are being made more accessible throughout the country, which is a very good thing.

I rise today to make two points. First, as has been said by everybody so far and doubtless will be said throughout the rest of the debate, the importance of the arts and the creative industries to the UK simply cannot be overestimated. Whichever way you look at it, economically or in terms of soft power, the UK is an astonishingly creative country and intellectual property lies at the heart of it. Of course, thanks to the helpful Library briefing, the House will be aware of the DCMS statistics showing that the creative industries sector has contributed around £109 billion to the UK economy; that is a large sum by any standard. The largest subsector in the creative industries, listed as IT, software and computer services, accounted for 2.3% of the UK economy in 2021. Since then, overall employment in the country has fallen but, in that subsector, it has in fact increased by around 5.1%.

However, far too often in this country an artificial dividing line is drawn between the arts and the sciences. In reality, so many of today’s creative industries straddle that divide and render it meaningless in any real sense. The arts and creative industries encompass, and in some cases rely hugely on, the creative sciences in which the UK excels in many areas.

I will take the example of video games, which the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, has already mentioned. The video games industry alone depends on people having mathematical and coding skills to a very high degree. Now let us consider the other aspects involved, such as architecture, design and imaginative storytelling—not to mention the music. Those who listen to Classic FM will know that, in recent years, music generated for video games has increasingly played a part in its “Top 300 of the Year”.

Noble Lords will know that, in 1959, the novelist CP Snow gave a lecture entitled “The Two Cultures”, later published in book form as The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. My noble friend Lord Chandos quoted Churchill; other people have referred to him. I am going to quote a brief extract from a lecture that CP Snow gave only 21 years later. His thesis was that science and the humanities, which represented

“the intellectual life of the whole of western society”,

had become split into “two cultures”, and that this division was a major handicap to both in solving the world’s problems. People know this phrase but often do not know the actual argument that he used. He said:

“A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s? I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question—such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read?—not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language.”


One of the reasons why that phrase, “two cultures”, has persisted down the decades is because it has struck a nerve. I know that your Lordships’ Communications and Digital Committee is conducting an inquiry into the UK’s creative industries, and I look forward to its result, but I hope it will also recognise the role, contribution and creativity of the science sector.

Secondly, we should never forget that one of the attractions of the UK as a place to do science is that it also offers unrivalled artistic and cultural experiences and heritage. Do noble Lords imagine that scientists are somehow different from everybody else—that the enormous artistic and cultural attractions of the UK do not play a part in encouraging them to come here to do their research? Of course, funding and the huge international links on offer are very important factors, but when eminent scientists decide where to live and work, the arts and culture of a country are a key factor in their decisions, and the UK has traditionally had that pull in spades. We benefit enormously from their presence here, and it is for this reason too, in part, that the present paralysis over the UK’s future participation in Horizon Europe is such a tragedy.

I will add just one thing in view of the briefings we have had about music. The Government should seek to reach an agreement with the EU to allow young musicians and youth orchestras to tour Europe and vice versa, because the collapse of such opportunities is another tragedy of Brexit.

In conclusion, we need to think of this whole area in a slightly different way. We should regard the strategy needed, as outlined in the Motion before us today, as being as important to our science base as to the arts and creative industries as traditionally defined. This is an opportunity to bring these two cultures together—the arts and sciences—as two sides of the same coin, feeding and stimulating each other for all our benefit. On this occasion, I rather wish that we had two Ministers winding up: the Minister we have in front of us, and perhaps the Minister for Science. However, I recognise that we have just the one, so I look forward very much to what he has to say.