Contribution
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my friend, the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, and I congratulate my friend the noble Baroness, Lady Featherstone, on this important Private Member’s Bill, which, as we know, would enable access to creative and cultural education in state-funded schools. I will return to this a little later. I also pay tribute to and welcome my noble friend Lady Mackenzie. She is someone I have known for many years, and her work and commitment to the arts goes back decades. She has encouraged bold, inclusive work that has pulled in creators and audiences. I remember my own experience when she helped to give birth to the remarkable work by Phelim McDermott and his company at Nottingham Playhouse in the early 1990s. We are indeed fortunate to have her in the House, and I look forward to her maiden speech.
This Bill is crucial, and I hope that the Government will have the good sense to adopt it. I argue this from a personal perspective: there can be no greater start in life than access to the arts and the creative industries. At the age of 11, I was written off because I failed my 11-plus, an exam I did not even know I was taking, and I was shunted off, as with so many others, to a secondary modern education. I was in a place where I felt I just did not belong. It was painful, and I became a rebel—but thankfully, due to my mimicry and my sense of mischief, which I have not lost, I came to the attention of the drama teacher and my life changed. I was no longer the rebel; I had an outlet for my imagination and my energy. There, behind that tatty, faded red curtain in the assembly hall of Cardinal Griffin School in Poplar, east London, I discovered another world that I did not know existed, and it was a world that I did not want to end.
It lifted me from the pain and the confusion that was around me, and it gave me options that I had never dreamed of. Access to these classes literally changed my life. I was discovered in the school show impersonating Eartha Kitt and Bud Flanagan—the outrageous and the sublime. A talent scout spotted me, and I ended up starring in “Oliver!” in the West End of London at the age of 12. My life changed.
But my arts education could not be maintained in the school. I went to an art school and learned in detail about the English language, drama, dance, ballet, music, elocution and improvisation. Improvisation sets the mind free. The mind is like a parachute; it works best when it is open. Creative access ignites the imagination and enables us to imagine and to enter other worlds. It gives us the ability to stand in the shoes of others, and we are all the better for it.
As your Lordships have probably gathered, I am passionate about this issue because an arts education and access to the arts are not luxuries; they are essential to the way we live and engage with others, and particularly to how we engage with the unknown. An active imagination and learning and using language skills and confidence skills are the necessary skills for life and lifelong learning. They give us the ability to actively listen—only then can we properly engage. These life skills will outlive artificial intelligence.
Finally, the other essential part of an arts-based creative education is recognising that there is no such thing as failure. All too often in politics, I hear from one Dispatch Box or the other how it is problematic to bring about a suggested solution, and so there is withdrawal. I entered politics to solve problems, not to create them or just talk about them. Maybe, just maybe, if more of us were more willing to work together cross-party and not be terrified of failure, and if we sought solutions instead of highlighting problems, politics might be seen in a much more positive way.
I cannot welcome this Private Member’s Bill more passionately, because it has the ability to change young people’s lives and change them for the better.