Harriet Harman, the former deputy leader of the Labour party, is to take on a fresh challenge: persuading working-class students that learning to dance or play an instrument is not a luxury or a waste of time.
Harman, the long-standing MP for Camberwell and Peckham, is the latest to follow a trend for former frontbench politicians to take up roles in the arts. After Ed Balls took to the dancefloor as a Strictly Come Dancing contestant and Ed Miliband spun discs on Radio 2 last month, Harman is to be announced this week as the new chair of Trinity Laban, a leading south London dance and music conservatoire. “I don’t feel I will have to suspend my party views, because the issues facing me are the same,” she said.
She told the Observer she plans to encourage a new generation to see a creative education as a sensible investment and not a risk.
“The risk now is for people to do the same thing they have always done,” she said this weekend. “There is a misconception that if you go into the arts or learn performance skills you will have to face financial insecurity. That is no longer true.
“Some parents, particularly if they are used to uncertainty about money, try to encourage their children to train for business, or for professions like medicine, or work in finance. But actually the training you get in the arts is going to be the most useful thing in the future. It gives you the confidence to be outward-facing and is an increasingly good way to avoid financial insecurity.”
Harman added that, despite the growing value of the arts to the British economy, the sector is still undervalued on both sides of the political divide. “There is a pushback from the right, because they don’t like spending people’s money on the arts. They think this side of life should be left to the market.
“And there is a pushback from the left too, because of the feeling this is something for the upper classes. But we have to look forward. I am not going to be looking to my left or my right.”
Anthony Bowne, principal of Trinity Laban, said his conservatoire was the right place for Harman to pursue this ambition. “It is also the perfect place for people who are aspirational to study,” he said. “We not only have a 90% employment rate for our graduates, which is much higher than other London conservatoires: 88% of our intake is from state schools, while it is more like 40% at other places.”
The two-campus conservatoire was formed in 2005 by the merger of two established institutions, Trinity College of Music in Greenwich and the Laban Dance Centre, which was named after the dancer and theorist Rudolf Laban, and was the first place to offer dance as a degree subject.
Harman said that attracting disadvantaged pupils into dance and music was “essential” for the arts as well as good for the students. “The widest pool of creative talent must be drawn upon,” she said. “Those kind of people are extremely important to attract.”
Bowne added that Brexit posed a huge challenge to Trinity Laban, where 17% of the students are from Europe, as well as to the performing arts generally.
Harman said the danger to the arts was “isolation and stagnation”. “We will become the cultural equivalent of North Korea,” she said. “The idea will soon get around in Europe that we are no longer the place to be. We cannot be isolated and inward-looking. The result of that would be stultification.”
