§ Mr. Edward O'Hara (Knowsley, South)I beg to move,
That leave be given to bring in a Bill to clarify the respective responsibilities of trustees and the Secretary of State in terms of international co-operation and the exchange of cultural objects between museums.The Bill is modest, but it would be enormously beneficial to those who want great cultural objects to be displayed to best purpose and best effect. It would clarify the responsibilities of museum trustees and the Secretary of State in terms of international co-operation and the exchange of cultural objects between museums. I take the situation of the trustees of the British museum regarding the Elgin marbles collection, which largely consists of sculptures hacked from the Parthenon in Athens.The Parthenon is a UNESCO world heritage site, and rightly so, for it has unique symbolic importance in the history of western civilisation. Most marbles in the Elgin collection are integral components of the structural and artistic unity of the building. The Parthenon and its sculptures can be fully appreciated only in conjunction. Without the sculptures, the Parthenon is incomplete. As Neil Kinnock once so memorably put it, without the marbles the Parthenon has a gap-toothed smile. Without the Parthenon the sculptures lack important context.
A new Acropolis museum is to be built opposite the south slope of the Acropolis, in the one location in the world where the Parthenon and its sculptures can be viewed simultaneously, in a single visual experience. My Bill would allow the trustees, if they wished and if the Secretary of State agreed, to transfer the marbles to Athens to make that remarkable experience possible.
It is not a question of ownership of the marbles. The manner in which Lord Elgin obtained them is disputable, and it would be possible to argue about it inconclusively and for ever, but the marbles belong neither to the British museum nor to the British Government, nor even to the Greek government. I can imagine Socrates, who described himself as not Athenian or Greek but universal, looking up at the Acropolis as he said that. In truth, in belonging to the Parthenon the marbles belong to the whole of humanity.
The Parthenon cannot come to the marbles. They, therefore, should go back to the Parthenon. It is a potent argument. The arguments traditionally ranged against the return of the Parthenon marbles are now hackneyed and long since discredited. It is said that they were rescued by Lord Elgin. Okay, but rescue does not justify keeping them for ever. It is said that they have been in safe-keeping in the British museum. Does that include abrading the surfaces with carborundum, or holding buffet receptions in the Duveen gallery?
It is said that the Greeks could not look after the marbles properly. That is an unsustainable slur on the professional expertise of the Greek Archaeological Service. It is said that more people see the marbles in the British museum than would see them in Athens. The figures cited refer to all visitors to the British museum, not all of whom visit the Duveen gallery. Hardly any of the millions of visitors to the Acropolis would miss the marbles if they were there.
775 It is said that there is not a museum to put the marbles in. As I have said, the Greek Government have commissioned a grand new Acropolis museum with a glass-walled gallery, facing the Parthenon, reserved for the display of the marbles. I repeat that that is the only place on earth where the marbles and the Parthenon can be viewed together in a single visual experience.
It is said that returning the marbles to Athens would open the floodgates, and lead to the emptying of the great museums of the world. That is a serious argument that must be addressed, but it is exaggerated. We are talking about integral components hacked off a great immovable monument. How many of those are there in the museums of the world? We should imagine the sculptures being hacked off the Arc de Triomphe, the chariots being taken from the Brandenburg gate, Nelson's statue being removed from its column in Trafalgar square, several pillars being removed from Stonehenge, or the torch being hacked off the Statue of Liberty. Come to think of it, the latter would probably result not in an Act of Congress—or the presentation of a museums Bill to Congress—but in a coalition against the evil of cultural vandalism.
In fact there are not many such examples in the world's museums, and where there are, perhaps the case for their return should be carefully examined. The German Government provided a good example last year. Their museums contained several pieces of the Philippeion at Olympia. They have returned them, and are undertaking to reconstruct the building at their expense.
It is said that the Elgin marbles are part of the encyclopaedic collection of the British museum. That is a serious argument: perhaps they are—but they are not indispensable to it. They are exemplars of Greek culture. The Greek Government would readily supply an even more comprehensive set of exemplars of Greek culture to replace the marbles. It is said that the marbles have been here for so long that they are now part of our heritage. That argument takes my breath away, and does not merit a response.
Refuting those arguments one by one, however, is to no avail. The trustees of the British museum are forbidden by law to transfer the Parthenon marbles to Athens. So what? They do not want to anyway. The director made that clear in a recent article in The Times. But directors and trustees come and go, and in future a director and trustees may find the legal restriction irksome. My Bill would remove it. Then, at the very least, the trustees would not be in the unedifying position of hiding behind the hackneyed arguments I have just refuted, or falling back on the logical stopper of the law.
I am not talking about ceding legal title to the ownership of the marbles. The argument has moved on from that: it is now about where they should be. There is strong and increasing support in the country and in Parliament for their being reunited with the Parthenon. A 1996 Channel 4 viewers poll by William J. Stewart, with a return of 100,000, showed a majority of 90 per cent. in favour. A 1998 MORI poll and a 1999 BBC internet poll returned majorities of eight to three. A 2000 poll of MPs by The Economist, to which 200 MPs responded, showed 66 per cent. overall and 84 per cent. of Labour Members to be in favour.
The results of the parliamentary poll are consistent with successive early-day motions attracting more than 100 signatures. Early-day motion 336 has already 776 attracted 107, to which we could add the names of Ministers, Whips and Parliamentary Private Secretaries who have registered their support in the past but are barred from doing so now.
As I have said, my Bill is not about ceding ownership of cultural objects by the British museum or any other museum to which this might apply. Such objects could be sent on renewable loan, the lending museum sharing with the borrowing museum responsibility for their display, study and conservation. That is not a new idea; it accords with modern museum practice. In January 2000, the Museums and Galleries Commission published "Restitution and Repatriation: Guidelines for Good Practice". The guidelines were commended by the Government, by a House of Commons Select Committee and by the Museums Association. Any reasonable application of them would result in a return of the Parthenon marbles.
Great museums in America, Europe and Australia have followed this practice. Even the British museum trustees, according to their submission to the Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport,
have in the past explored the possibility of reciprocal exchange of objects as long term renewable loans".They also told the Committee:we could possibly examine the possibility of exchange loansinvolving the Parthenon marbles. Robert Anderson himself said:This has been brought up by the museum before. Where two countries have two halves of two individual objects there is the possibility of a long term loan between them. This does seem to me to be sensible.What is there for the British museum in such a change in legal practice? Plenty. The museum would gain enormous credit for its enlightened approach to the display of such important cultural objects. Furthermore, the Greek Government are committed to replacing the Parthenon marbles in the British museum with a rotating exhibition of treasures of Greek civilisation that would otherwise rarely be seen outside Greece.What is in it for Britain? Again, plenty. If the marbles are not returned, when the new Acropolis museum opens in 2004 the glass-walled gallery reserved for them will stand empty in living reproach to Britain in the eyes of millions of visitors to Athens from around the world. If they are returned, in the eyes of all those millions it will redound to Britain's credit that we have shown our commitment to the ideals of UNESCO by making whole again arguably the most powerful symbol of western civilisation, the Parthenon on the Acropolis in Athens. My Bill seeks to make that possible—
§ Madam Deputy Speaker(Sylvia Heal)Order. The hon. Gentleman's time is up.
§ Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham)I oppose the Bill. I declare an interest as a member of the British Museum Society, and as one who has studied classics and archaeology.
The hon. Member for Knowsley, South (Mr. O'Hara) made a good case, and I agree with some of what he said. Certainly the marbles belong to the whole of humanity, not just to any one nation. He would be expected to make 777 a good case, as chairman of the all-party parliamentary Greece group. He was also honest enough to come clean about the fact that this is really all about the Elgin marbles. His Bill may be a Trojan horse—an appropriate phrase in this context—but that is what it is about. It should really be subtitled "Give Greece the Elgin marbles to show that we are good Europeans".
The hon. Gentleman said that his proposals were modest, but they are not. The implications for the future of all world museums housing universal collections are enormous. I oppose this latest attempt at iconoclastic decontextualisation and will judge it on the following grounds. Are the Elgin marbles rightfully in the British museum, are they in the best place to be appreciated most by the widest audience, and what are the real motives for destroying the status quo?
On the first charge, that the Elgin marbles are not legitimately in the British museum, even Greece no longer challenges the legal ownership of the marbles. In 1815, Parliament bought the marbles by paying part of Lord Elgin's costs. In 1816, a Select Committee said that they had been rightfully acquired. That judgment has been confirmed by a Select Committee report in 1999, by the former Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, the right hon. Member for Islington, South and Finsbury (Mr. Smith), and by the former Minister for the Arts, the right hon. Member for Newport, East (Alan Howarth), who is here today and who ratifies the judgment in his excellent article in The Guardian today.
I come to the defence of the much maligned Lord Elgin. The marbles were not housed in a private collection but given to the British museum in 1816. They became an integral part of the British museum's heritage and are intrinsic to its identity. It was Lord Elgin who saved the Parthenon marbles: without him, they would not exist. They were legally taken under a firman. Placing the marbles in the British museum led to an appreciation of the high classical style in the early 19th century, which had been overlooked in preference to the hellenistic style of sculpture. There is also a case for saying that bringing the marbles to the British museum encouraged an awareness of hellenism and the foundation of the Greek state in 1833, a far cry from the city state of Athens in classical times.
Would it not be odd if after almost 200 years of the Parthenon marbles being in the British museum, and as the British museum prepares to celebrate its 250th anniversary next year, an integral part of its heritage were ripped from its walls? There is no case for saying that they are not rightfully part of the British museum. The hon. Member for Knowsley, South would be better off looking at the urgent matter of clamping down on the illegal trade in artefacts between private collections, which often goes on unprovenanced and unrecorded.
The second charge is that the British museum is not the best place for displaying the Elgin marbles. The British museum holds no place for nationalism. It is a universal museum. The idea of a universal museum is the outcome of the 18th-century age of enlightenment. It is a national museum in the great tradition of the Louvre, the Metropolitan museum of art in New York and the Berlin national museum. The British museum regards it as a privilege to display some of the finest artworks known 778 to man, and has a responsibility to promote public understanding of them through exhibitions, publications, educational programmes and, in the case of the Elgin marbles, video displays with computer graphics.
The British museum is a world museum. Forces for educational and cultural enlightenment across the globe exist there. It has 6 million visitors a year. Academics, students, school children, Greeks, Britons, South Africans, Koreans all visit for free. They are able to see the Elgin marbles not just as a single artistic treasure but in the context of the great developing panoply of archaic and classical art and architecture.
In the British museum, visitors can trace artistic development through Sumerian gudea figures, Mesopotamian site artefacts, Assyrian reliefs from Nineveh and Nimrud, Egyptian kouroi, early classical statuary and high classical, hellenistic, Roman and renaissance artefacts; the British museum itself is built in a neoclassical style. They are all under one roof, all for free and all properly explained, displayed and set in context.
Decontextualisation would be a disaster and would open a Pandora's box, whatever the hon. Member for Knowsley, South says. Mesopotamian finds dug up because of the tenacity of British archaeologists in the 1900s and previously would be returned to Iraq and Iran, perhaps never to be seen again. The Benin bronzes would go to Nigeria, despite the fact that the British museum helped to build the collection of bronzes in Nigeria itself and has done an awful lot to promote the heritage and history of west Africa. When Nelson Mandela visited the British museum just 13 months ago on the opening of three new African galleries, he praised the British museum as
this truly international institution for enriching and cross-fertilising the world's institutions.The wish is to send the Elgin marbles to a special museum set apart from the Parthenon—a museum that has not even yet been started and has been promised for years. They are not to go on the Parthenon itself. One of the finest metopes on the west end of the Parthenon has been sitting there for centuries in one of the most polluted cities in Europe; it has not been rescued and taken down. Fourteen blocks of the west frieze were removed in 1993 and have not seen the light of day again. The Acropolis receives fewer than 2.5 million paying visitors, less than half the number of visitors who go to the British museum, most of whom go to see the Elgin marbles in particular.In the fifth century, Pericles and the fleet of artists under Phidias built the splendour of classical Athens not just as an impressive environment for local Athenians but as a symbol to the world of how quickly civilisation had developed under Athens' artistic and military prowess: it was the top nation of the day. No one would be more impressed by the longevity of that legacy in the British museum two and a half millennia later than Pericles himself.
What are the real motives? It is all political. Academically, there is no case to return the Elgin marbles and other works of art to Athens. They are in the ownership of the British museum but they belong to the history of world civilisation. To treat them as some political trophy that can be traded for short-term political advantage is the worst reason for ripping them out of the heart of one of the world's great museums.
The British museum should not he treated as some state Aladdin's cave to buy power and influence at random. To do so would be to return to the classical times mentality 779 of warring fiefdoms whence the Elgin marbles came, and would be deeply patronising to the modern democracy that is Greece.
No doubt the Greeks would view us as better Europeans if we made a gesture of handing them the Elgin marbles after 200 years, just as the Government want to make the Spanish view us as better Europeans by handing over Gibraltar after almost 300 years, yet it does not make our equal partners, Greece and Spain, better Europeans by pressing for such moves and expecting us to comply under duress and for all the wrong reasons.
The intentions behind the Bill are clear but the motives are entirely wrong and the implications for the academic world would be catastrophic. The hon. Member for Knowsley, South made his case with some passion, not as much as the late Melina Mercouri and certainly with fewer tears, but just as we echoed her sentiments to her in "Never on a Sunday", so I ask the House to say to the hon. Gentleman, "Never on a Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday or Monday for that matter."
§ Question put, pursuant to Standing Order No. 23 (Motions for leave to bring in Bills and nomination of Select Committees at commencement of public business):—
§ The House proceeded to a Division; but no Member being willing to act as Teller, MR. DEPUTY SPEAKER declared that the Ayes had it.
§ Question agreed to.
§ Bill ordered to be brought in by Mr. Edward O'Hara, Mr. Tom Cox, Mr. Andrew Dismore, Mrs. Jackie Lawrence, Andy Burnham, Mr. Richard Allan and Mr. Kevin McNamara.