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Creative Industries

My Lords, I am extremely grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Bragg, for introducing the debate, and particularly for—on a slightly different tack from the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh—emphasising the creative industries’ economic significance to Britain. That is particularly important in the context of what I might call the post-financial-crash world, although I am tempted as an aside to comment that I suspect that the trouble there was a trifle too much creativity. The point about the creative industries’ talent and creativity is that it does not come from nowhere; it needs to be nurtured, appreciated and rewarded. In my few remarks, I would like to say a little about, first, failure, which we have not talked about yet; secondly, the past; thirdly, leadership; and fourthly, education. The older I get, the more I am staggered by the number of bad paintings in the world. An awful lot of them were thought to be good at the point at which they were created. If you go into a bookshop, it is unbelievable how many bad books are on the shelves; if you go into the basement of a second-hand bookshop, it is even worse. You have to realise that, for the people who created them all, they were important intellectual projects. However, to have a successful creative economy—rather like to have an effective programme of scientific research, a point made recently in an article that I read by the noble Lord, Lord Rees of Ludlow—it is necessary to understand failure. Society must know how to handle it and deal with its financial implications. I remember talking long ago to Sir Sydney Samuelson about film, and I said, "Can you predict which film will be a success?". He said, "No, but I can tell from a group of 10 which film will become successful; nine of them will flop". The problem is rather like something that I was saying to the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, yesterday about the Treasury’s approach to the previous regime about film finance; it appeared to be too successful—in other words, it involved too much money—and somehow it had not produced, in its view, enough good films. However, to have a successful creative economy, there has to be failure and an understanding that that is inevitable. For there to be a continuing pool of talent, it must be continuously replenished from the younger generation. The characteristic of the younger generation, in every generation, is that it rejects history. The world did not start in 1997, 1979 or 1879; it is always a case of one generation reacting against and moving on from the previous one. The pendulum swings backwards and forwards. One of the essential preconditions of a thriving creative sector of the economy is a thriving education sector, which has to understand history and the context in which we are living. Yet do we as a society properly fund and support what I might call the framework for that sort of education to take place? The Victoria and Albert, to name but one such institution, was established as much as anything else as a resource for students. That is true of many of the great provincial museums round this country. We do not fund them properly. We are a country that seems to have gone to war in Iraq without really thinking twice about its cost. If you take the longer view, which is more important to our country in the future? Do we have our cost-benefit analysis properly worked out? Another important contextual aspect, on which nobody has yet touched, is the influence of old buildings and landscape on every member of society. That is probably the way in which we are touched by what has gone before in a bigger and wider sense than almost any other, yet how does society operate? The state seems to put hurdles and barriers in front of people who want to improve and maintain things. I always suspect that neglect and lack of maintenance has done far more to destroy our cultural architectural heritage than the Luftwaffe ever did. Again we come back to the question of whether those who take the decisions fully balance the benefits and costs represented by a world where the creative economy is becoming important. As I said, much of what is created is not very good. The market sorts some of it out, but not all of it. I often wonder whether those involved in cultural leadership necessarily give enough support and credit to those who understand, and who can point out to the rest of us who follow, what is good. Some of us may have been to see the pictures that the British Council bought that are on show in the Whitechapel art gallery. It is an extraordinary testament to the ability of the original purchasing team to see what it acquired then. The noble Lord, Lord Bragg, will know that Carlisle—my home city, and very close to where he comes from—had the most enlightened policy of art acquisition between the wars and after the Second World War; Carlisle city gallery has a remarkable collection. That policy was made by those in political authority acting on the judgment and expertise of those who knew what they were doing, and not simply being swayed by a kind of—if I can be rather crude about it—debased populism. I have touched on what is crucial for the future: that we have an education system to develop the talent that will enable us as a nation to derive the economic benefits that the creative industries are capable of providing for us. That education system must be rigorous and properly founded. I suspect that the chances of it turning out, certainly at degree-show level, material that the Members of this House might appreciate and enjoy at first blush are pretty remote. Indeed, I suspect that something would be wrong were it to do so. However, the danger that faces the country is that, if the system of education is organised on a kind of tick-in-the-box measurement output basis, we will stifle the creativity that will be so important economically for the future. Again, how is the cost-benefit analysis working in this area? For me, the key to understanding creativity lies in one’s analysis of what "Culture" is all about. Too much now in this country, the "C" in "DCMS" has become synonymous simply with what people do in their spare time; that is not as it should be at all. In this country—it is a characteristic that seems to go back many years—I fear that we do not really care much about this. We, particularly the English, pride ourselves on having common sense and our feet on the ground. As a result, we do not give proper credit to the economic significance of these areas of human endeavour. It was summed up to me succinctly some years ago when I went as our country’s representative to the informal Culture Council in Bologna. There was I, and my Italian counterpart was Walter Veltroni, then Deputy Prime Minister. While I do not think that Italy is a very good political comparator, I suspect, perhaps at least in this little regard, that it may have got it a bit more right than we did. The problem is that those in the public sector who view these things cannot evaluate what the cultural and creative sector contributes to our country—not in aesthetic, artistic or spiritual terms, which are important anyway, but in hard economic terms. In the post-industrial world into which we are moving, that will become increasingly important. It is important that this issue is revisited in a hard-nosed way to make sure that the bean counters and the accountants, in putting together our "national plan", have this issue clear in their heads. The underlying problem is that culture, like politics, is something that we in this country want on the cheap. And look where that has got us—we seem to know the price of everything and the value of nothing.