Authors, Booksellers and Libraries: Economic Recovery

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Monday 10th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

I certainly agree with what the noble Earl says, and I am pleased to say that the Booksellers Association reports that independent booksellers have increased in number over the last two years: more than 50 new independent bookstores were opened last year and the year before. That includes the excellent Forum Books in Whitley Bay, thanks to the encouragement of Ann Cleeves, the author of the Vera books, who, I am pleased to say, was awarded an OBE in the New Year Honours List for services to reading and libraries. The noble Earl is right to point to the plight of authors. A statutory instrument is being introduced today increasing the rate for the PLR. Authors also benefit from support from Arts Council England, including through its “time to write” grants—so they are in the Government’s mind.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

If the Government genuinely agree with the noble Earl, when are we going to do something about this unfair competition between Amazon and the high street bookshop? Amazon may be good, but people can browse in a bookshop, and they should be able to do it without fearing that the bookshop will close.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

As I said, the Booksellers Association reports that the number of independent bookshops has grown over the past 22 months. Its membership is up 12% since the pandemic began. As my noble friend knows, we will continue to consider the arguments for and against an online sales tax which, if introduced, would raise revenue to fund business rates reductions.

Covid-19: Entertainment and Arts Venues

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Tuesday 14th December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Earl is right to point to the fact that we are doing everything we can to support the sector to return to doing what it loves and what people love to enjoy it doing. We launched the live events reinsurance scheme in September, and I will certainly look at examples where people are not able to benefit from it. Self-employed people have been able to enjoy some of the other support that has been given by the Treasury but, again, I am very happy to hear from freelancers and those representing them to make sure that the support is being given.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

Does my noble friend acknowledge that English choral music is particularly enriched by church music? Is the Royal School of Church Music eligible for grants from the Culture Recovery Fund?

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

I do not know specifically, but I will follow up on my noble friend’s request, find out whether it has bid for any of the rounds of the Culture Recovery Fund and write to him with the answer.

Freedom of Speech

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Friday 10th December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, that is a refreshing and stimulating speech to follow and I congratulate my friend, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness. I join all others in paying tribute to the most reverend Primate for introducing this debate and for the manner in which he did so.

I was struck by a number of speeches that, in the last hour, have sought to bring a sense of perspective to this debate. I single out the speech of my noble friend Lady Sanderson of Welton—I entirely echo what she said about Rose Tremain—and the invigorating speech of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood, who effectively said to us, “Don’t look for offence when it is not necessarily intended”. We are in danger of becoming oversensitive, because free speech is indeed—as the noble Lord, Lord Cashman, said—the life-blood of a free society and democracy.

I remember sitting in the gallery of another place in 1965, I think it would have been. I was a young Conservative candidate for Grimsby, having bloodied myself in Bolsover in 1964. Michael Foot held the floor. He later became a close and dear friend, much as I disagreed with most of what he said, although we bonded over Bosnia and addressed a rally together in Trafalgar Square. In the House of Commons, Michael Foot was holding forth. He said, “You need vigorous debate in the House and in the country. When I am addressing rallies, I don’t duck: I wait until I see the whites of their eggs.” Michael Foot was true to that.

One of my most undying memories is of a party we had—parties are very fashionable at the moment, are they not?—in a colleague’s house not far from here to mark the 80th birthday of Enoch Powell. There were two great parliamentarians; I disagreed with both of them on many things, although I had the honour of giving the address at Enoch’s funeral. What struck me there was that the speech of appreciation was made by Peter Shore and the presentation of a silver salver inscribed with the words “Poet, scholar, soldier, orator” was made by Michael Foot. He and his wife Jill used to meet Enoch and his wife Pam on a regular and frequent basis because they respected each other as parliamentarians. You do not have to agree in order to respect. Many of the better things in this House and the other place are achieved by parliamentarians of different political persuasions working together.

A sort of intolerance has crept in, accentuated by social media; if I could have one Christmas wish, I would uninvent it, although of course I cannot. It creates a situation where recently, for instance, it came to my notice that a group of people from outside the House refused to attend a meeting inside it because they disagreed with the views of the chairman on a wholly different subject. We must get beyond that. We must really respect.

One of the problems is that we have social media but we no longer have many real meetings. When I was a young candidate, and at all the 10 general elections I won, I used to have meetings in my constituency every night. In the 1960s and the early 1970s, they were often quite packed. The attendance tended to fall off but I kept the meetings; I never had fewer than 20 people there but, in the 1960s and the early 1970s, it was not unusual to have 100 or 200 people. There was vigorous debate but there was no bitter argument. There is a difference between vigorous debate and bitter argument. We have to try to get the bitterness out of public life and not be overly sensitive.

I do not agree with a lot of what the noble Lord, Lord Cashman, said but, to quote Voltaire—to whom the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown, alluded—I would defend to the death his right to say it. Now we have a group of people who are saying, “I don’t like what you say and I will do everything possible to prevent your saying it”. That is a real difference.

In the area of gender, some women have been vilified to an absolutely unpardonable extent. Professor Kathleen Stock has been mentioned a number of times in this debate, as has JK Rowling. They are merely stating views and opinions—some of us would say facts—that have been indisputable since time immemorial. It is important that they are not vilified. The term “cancel culture” is perhaps the most sinister in our modern political vocabulary. The most reverend Primate has done a great service in giving us the opportunity to debate some of these things. I beg noble Lords in all parts of the House to remember, in this season of good will, that toleration and understanding are as important as they ever have been.

Ofcom: Appointment of Chair

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Wednesday 24th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

On the first part of the noble Baroness’s question, yes, this underlines the importance of having independent people appointed to oversee such important regulators. It also underlines the need for boards with a broad and diverse range of views. All government departments and regulators such as Ofcom benefit from that breadth of experience and views.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

Is it not vital that whoever is chosen is articulate, has a strong mind and, most of all, has the courage to stand up to the giants of social media?

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

The criteria for this big and important job are published online and note the role that Ofcom has in regulating not just the traditional media but the social media too.

Age Assurance (Minimum Standards) Bill [HL]

Lord Cormack Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 19th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, for initiating this debate and putting the Bill before the House. I pay tribute to 5Rights and the fantastic work it is doing. I should put on record that I am a governor of Coram, which was founded in 1739 and is the oldest children’s charity in the UK—we have been fighting for children’s rights for rather a long time, and, thankfully, for rather a long time before the internet was dreamed up.

Yesterday, the noble Baroness, Lady Fookes, and I had the pleasure of going to Wandsworth and spending three hours at a very large girls’ school there, called Burntwood School. It has about 1,800 pupils. It is incredibly diverse. Believe it or not, no fewer than 70 languages are spoken by the 1,800 pupils. Part of the visit was a question and answer session with around 100 of the girls. One of the questions they asked us was about internet safety and what we felt about it, so we were able to talk a bit about the online safety Bill and I was able to say that I would have the privilege of speaking in today’s debate.

Later on, we were talking with the teachers, who said that, during the pandemic, when everybody was in bubbles and the children were perhaps relying on social media more than usual, they decided that they needed to do a bit of homework. Somewhat to their surprise, they found that the legal age below which you are not meant to use WhatsApp is 13. It turns out that that is an unexpected negative Brexit dividend; if we were still in the EU or the European Economic Area, the minimum age would be 16, but one of the freedoms we have won in leaving the European Union is that the age has dropped to 13.

I thought I would use WhatsApp as an example because, although I know it is against the rules to ask noble Lords to put their hand up if they are on WhatsApp, I anticipate that it is probably the social media or communication app that most of us use—I am sure that most of us are in one or two groups.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

Not me.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

I understand that, in Lincolnshire, the reception is particularly bad. I am sure if the noble Lord asks the Government to do something about it they would improve it.

As we are all using WhatsApp, I thought it might be instructive to talk about what it does and, more to the point, the onus it puts on, in this case, the parents of children—first, to find out whether their children are using it, and, secondly, to find out whether they should be using it. If they decide that they should not be using it, the onus is entirely on the parents to contact WhatsApp with a variety of information, such as passports, to demonstrate that their child is underage. It may possibly respond, but it may not.

WhatsApp makes its money primarily through trying to get into the business world, and it makes money by selling emoticon stickers and online games. But it also plans to monetise the app by setting up a WhatsApp payment, rather like Apple Pay. You will see lots of people going on to the London Underground pointing their mobile phone as they enter, which is how they pay. So that is coming down the track.

WhatsApp has also announced a new privacy policy whereby, if users do not accept it, they will have to stop using the app. WhatsApp cannot do that in the EU, because it violates the GDPR, but in the rest of the world, it can. That is about to be rolled out this year, but I suspect very few of us know that.

Facebook, which owns WhatsApp, has just changed its name to Meta. In the law of unexpected consequences, in Hebrew, “meta” means “dead”; in Urdu, it means “delete”; and in certain dialects in my wife’s native Italy, it stands for a “pyramid of dung”. I am sure Mr Zuckerberg was aware of that when he changed the name.

What a lot of people do not realise with WhatsApp is that user groups can go up to 250 users; in Burntwood School, virtually all the children are in quite large groups. People say that WhatsApp is safe because it is end-to-end encrypted. However, any of the 250 in a group could share the details of the group with an outside person, who would immediately have access to every person. A lot of videos and photographs are put on WhatsApp groups, and although, in theory, they cannot be shared outside the group, as I am sure all noble Lords who are very au fait with how mobile phones work will know, you can easily take a screenshot to capture what is on a phone and send that on elsewhere. So WhatsApp is not terribly secure.

The school is particularly worried about its use for cyberbullying. It is worried about the fact that, quite regularly, spyware is used, there are requests for money and its students receive fraudulent job opportunities, even though they are still in school. This is not good, and the fact that the internet companies are, frankly, avoiding the responsibility they have to all of us—most particularly to our children and grandchildren—is simply unacceptable. The Government must do something. They really have no alternative.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to speak briefly in the gap because of what I have heard during this past hour or more. It has been a moving and powerful debate, so much so that I have asked my taxi to wait and I will risk the train. I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, for the way in which she introduced the Bill, and I thank the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford and the noble Baroness, Lady Greenfield, who provoked me into getting to my feet.

I do not do “online” and have no intention of doing so, but I know it cannot be uninvented and is here as a permanent fixture of society. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford talked about the 19th century and referred to those who went down the mines and up the chimneys. Their bodies were broken but often their minds were still intact. What we are talking about here is distorting the brain, as we heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Greenfield, and destroying the mind.

The biggest crime that any society can commit is the destruction of childhood innocence. We have gone some way towards that, and I have mentioned it before in your Lordships’ House, but we have a chance here to move forward one definite step. There is still much to do, but I say to my noble friend the Minister that we demand action this day.

Artists and Musicians: Working in Europe

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Thursday 9th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I am not sure whether I have the exact precision of the noble Lord’s use of language but we have set out that we now have clear guidance around short-term touring with 19 member states. However, we are also focused on the outcomes and achieving ease of movement for our artists, including existing successes such as clarifying, for example, that touring artists and support staff will not be double charged for social security contributions.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, have not the Proms wonderfully illustrated this summer what an international language music is? Can we make it plain that we in this country are prepared to admit any European musicians, just as we welcomed Haydn and Mozart in the 18th century?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

My noble friend is absolutely right and already we have announced, for the reasons he set out, generous criteria for European musicians performing here.

Choirs: Restrictions

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Wednesday 30th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I will need to write to the noble Baroness with details on sanctions, but I assume that they are available on GOV.UK.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, does not my noble friend understand that she has been trying valiantly to defend the totally indefensible? Does she not accept that the cultural life of this country rests to some degree on the continuance of amateur choirs? If she goes on repeating these answers and the Government do not show a proper degree of flexibility, many of these choirs will cease to exist.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The Government have acted incredibly powerfully to support the cultural life of this country. We absolutely recognise its importance in relation to amateur choirs and the whole spectrum of performing arts, which is why we are progressing with phase 3 of the more than £2 billion Culture Recovery Fund.

Public Representatives: Online Abuse

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Wednesday 16th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The noble Baroness is right to raise the unacceptable abuse that Nick Watt received the other day. I highlight that we have just published our National Action Plan for the Safety of Journalists and a call for evidence is live at the moment. I encourage your Lordships to contribute to that as appropriate.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, as we remember a very brave and remarkable woman, should we not also take on board the fact that public life has been further coarsened and cheapened since her death by the indiscriminate use of social media? Should we not take steps to outlaw anonymous contributions to social media?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The Government are clear that abuse is unacceptable, whether anonymous or not. Our intention is to try to address that.

Music Festivals: Covid-19-related Cancellations

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Tuesday 27th April 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I am sure the noble Baroness would agree that before taking that decision we need to understand the impact on infection rates of removing or amending social distancing, not using masks, the role of certification and the impact of allowing global travel, which all have a bearing on the viability of these events.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, while I appreciate what my noble friend is seeking to do, will she accept that musicians face a triple whammy? First, if the festivals cannot be insured, they cannot perform at them; secondly, many of them are self-employed but do not benefit from the provisions that are designed to help the self-employed; and, thirdly, the visa problem compounds these others.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The Government have been very clear in acknowledging the multiple challenges that my noble friend has outlined. That is why we have announced major funding for the sector, particularly through the Culture Recovery Fund and, most recently, in the expansion of the self-employed income support scheme. We continue to work closely with the sector to ensure that we can respond as needed.

British Library Board (Power to Borrow) Bill

Lord Cormack Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 19th March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, it is a very real privilege to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone. She was a very distinguished chairman of the British Library and did much to enhance it, and we are all in her debt.

I regard my noble friend Lord Vaizey with a degree of affectionate envy today, because I have the Bill that has languished at the top of the list from our ballot last year and is never going to be debated in this House unless I draw a high place in the next ballot. But he has done a service in bringing this Bill before us.

I am by nature against anomalies and for flexibility, and the Bill does away with a quite extraordinary anomaly. When you look at all our other great museums and galleries, it is right that this, one of the greatest institutions of its kind in the world—if not the greatest library in the world—should enjoy these simple benefits, not least because it is itself a marvellous lender. I speak with very real experience, because I was responsible for organising a couple of major exhibitions in Lincoln in 2015 to commemorate Magna Carta and in 2017 to commemorate the great Battle of Lincoln. We borrowed a number of our most significant things, including the Luttrell Psalter in the first exhibition. I had nothing but help from Claire Breay, who heads up medieval manuscripts, and her colleagues, and I pay tribute to them. Those who are lenders should be able to be borrowers too—and, of course, they do with their own exhibitions.

My noble friend is right that I was present when the original Act went through in another place. However, I am very sad that our noble friend Lord Eccles is not able to be here today. His father was very much the godfather of the British Library, and I know that our noble colleague is inordinately proud, and rightly so, of what his father achieved. I shall never forget the great opening ceremony and the series of other ceremonies that followed the opening of the library. Although there were views about its architecture, it has established itself as a quite marvellous institution, and it deserves every possible help from government.

When I look back on my nearly 51 years in Parliament, nothing from an Act of Parliament has been of greater benefit to the people of this country in the cultural sense than the British Library. I am very glad indeed that we have the opportunity to speed this Bill on its way this morning.