Health and Social Care — House of Commons, 2015-06-02
Topic: Culture
Alexander Jesse Norman (Conservative, Centre-right): I congratulate all those who have given their maiden speeches in this Queen’s Speech debate today and on previous days. We have seen a galaxy of talent, and it has been a delight to listen to them. I feel like a thorn amid a garland of roses. I also take my hat off to the hon. Member for Bristol West (Thangam Debbonaire), now departing, for her elegant misattribution of my great hero Burke, for which I thank her Having won my seat in 2010, I am not in a position to give a maiden speech, but I am pleased to report to the House that the voters of Hereford and South Herefordshire have returned me with a majority that increased from 2,500 to just under 17,000. It has always been my aspiration to make my seat one where they weigh the vote rather than count it, and I am pleased to report that we are making a little progress in that direction With that progress comes responsibility, and I want to dwell on that a little. We had the Hay festival all last week, on the edge of my constituency—an extraordinary gathering of ideas and words and music, bringing people together from across this country, indeed across the world. It is an extraordinary institution and one of which I have had the honour to be a director for the past few years. The festival—I am talking here not so much about health and social care in the strict sense as about the health and care of our society more widely—formed a fascinating contrast with our proceedings in Parliament. For the Queen’s Speech had many excellent elements within it—enterprise, finance, education, immigration, cities and the EU referendum, to name just a few—and it had a heavily economic focus, as befits the times in which we live. But it was striking that the list of Bills barely touched, or touches, the areas of arts and culture—social care in the wider sense that I have described. It was doubly striking in the light of the many excellent speeches that we have heard in the past few days. Time and again they returned to the role of culture, of soft power, in supporting and advancing our understanding of ourselves and our place in the wider world I think of the spat mentioned yesterday between Charles I and his wife Henrietta Maria in 1621, which was healed by the soft breezes of rural Hampshire, as my hon. Friend the Member for Fareham (Suella Fernandes) pointed out, while from the opposite side of the Chamber the hon. Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Ms Stuart) rightly highlighted the importance of the English language and of British norms and values in our foreign policy This House is no friend to abstract ideas, and I am pleased to say that it is not, but it is worth asking ourselves what we mean by culture. For some it is "The best that has been thought and said in the world". For others it is "the diffusion and extension of knowledge" within a society. There is something in both definitions. We have a staggeringly rich and diverse national culture in this country. Indeed, in many ways, ours is among the very richest and most diverse cultures in the world today. But that knowledge, that culture, cannot exist unless it is shared; unless it is diffused and extended, as Cardinal Newman put it. And it must be diffused and extended across the whole country But Mr Deputy Speaker, this is not the case today. Let me pick out two areas in which I suggest that we need early and resolute action from the Government to support the diffusion of culture. The first is communications. Vast areas of our country still do not have decent broadband, fast or otherwise. Vast areas of our country struggle to get a decent mobile signal. This affects rural areas and some urban areas in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland alike. We need an urgent action taskforce, led by Government but involving local government and the private and third sectors, to review how these issues can be swiftly resolved, and then to resolve them My second area, over and above communications, has to do with what is communicated; with knowledge, with understanding and the value of education, which are the cornerstones of our culture. Over the past five years, the Government, led by the Conservative party, have made great strides in education, almost across the entire age spectrum, but one crucial group has been left out—indeed worse, the group’s great achievements have arguably been put at a certain amount of risk. I mean our sixth-form colleges, which have an extraordinary record of educating young people at low cost and to high quality. Mr Deputy Speaker, we need to do something about this collectively in this Parliament. We need to do something about communications, rural broadband and a rural mobile signal. We need to do something about the diffusion of our culture across our country and the way in which we educate our young people in our sixth-form colleges This Government have rightly laid claim to the mantle of one nation, and have done so in the name of compassionate conservatism, but that inclusiveness—that fellow-feeling—demands that everyone be equally able to enjoy our history and our traditions, and share in the endlessly dynamic and creative culture that is Britain. For that, we need better broadband and better mobile signals, and we need to support our sixth-form colleges. To those ends, I hope that the Government will be able to introduce measures swiftly to address the issues that I have raised.