VE Day, Creative Industries and a Lindfield triumph
VE Day Remembered
For me, an important part of last week was commemorating the 80th Anniversary of VE Day. As well as writing about how VE Day was celebrated in in Mid Sussex in 1945 in my Middy column, and attending the flag raising at the war memorial in Burgess Hill, I took the opportunity to speak about the service of Edward Coomber from Cuckfield in the House of Commons. Edward Coomber served in the Photographic Reconnaissance Unit (the PRU), and sadly died during the war in a hospital in Salonika in Greece.
The Photographic Reconnaissance Unit provided critical intelligence to support the war effort, capturing an incredible 20 million images of enemy operations and installations during the six years of war. From its inception in 1939 through to the end of hostilities in 1945, the unit suffered horrendous losses. Records now show that the survival rate was proportionally the second lowest of any Allied aerial unit during the entire war.
Work is underway to build a memorial to the PRU, and I was pleased that in response to my speech the Veterans Minister, Al Cairns confirmed that work is progressing to secure planning permission for that memorial.
You can watch my speech in full on YouTube and review the Facebook clip that was posted by the Spitfire AA810 campaign group who are championing the memorial. If you are interested in learning more about the PRU, then the campaign group’s website is a good starting point.
Challenging times for the Creative Industries
Over the last month or so I have had two valuable meetings with Mid Sussex constituents who have made their name in the creative industries.
Actor Greta Scacchi and I had a fascinating conversation about dramatic arts education. As an alumna of the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, she is rightly concerned that her alma mater is cutting its undergraduate courses from this September. This is the result of a combination of factors - inadequate higher education funding, the limits on overseas students, and the value that we as a society place on supporting the arts.
Children’s author Chris Bradford and I were able to catch up last week ahead of a debate in the Commons on The Data (Use and Access) Bill. This Bill is a wide ranging piece of legislation, but Chris’s particular concern is about the abuse by Artificial Intelligence giants, who are scraping creatives’ content, and then using this to educate their machine learning models. As I said during the debate in the Commons, Chris and I both agree that AI has so many positive uses, but that taking the copyrighted material of creatives like Chris amounts to theft. In the votes following the debate, the government voted down a Liberal Democrat amendment that would have seen creatives’ intellectual property protected through UK copyright law.
So why do the creative industries matter?
The House of Commons Library estimates that the creative industries contributed around £124 billion to the economy in 2023 (in terms of gross value added). This was around 5% of total UK economic output. Here in the South East that means the jobs of 406,000 people.
The UK creative industries have been a success story over many years. We have talented people making the very best in theatre, film, publishing, fashion and music. This talent needs to be nurtured, and that’s why I was so pleased that at PMQs last Wednesday, Ed Davey highlighted our world leading film industry in the face of Trump’s tariffs on British made films.
A Lindfield Triumph
Finally for this week, a good news story.
I had a wonderful visit on Saturday to the Eastern Road Nature Reserve in Lindfield. You can read about the Reserve’s triumph in the face of adversity on Facebook.
Getting in touch
My parliamentary email address is: alison.bennett.mp@parliament.uk. If you need my help, please get in touch.
Best wishes,
Alison
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