Guy raised a number of issues in debates in the Lords before the summer recess - including music education, the impact of AI on the news media, VAT on school fees and the fate of Egyptian journalist All Adb el Fattah.
Music education
In a short debate on music education in state schools (24th June), Guy - who is Co-Chairman of the APPG on music education and Chairman of the Royal College of Music - voiced his frustration at the lack of action by the Government. He said: "We have had countless debates on this subject over the years. Each time another comes along I feel a growing sense of frustration—indeed anger—because, for all the fine words, we never seem to make progress. It did not make me popular with my colleagues at the time, but I was very critical of the previous Government for their failure to act to secure better music education in state schools. As music should be a bipartisan issue, I hoped that, with the change in Government, we would finally see some progress. But it is a year on from the election and still nothing has changed: no progress on post-Brexit visa issues, the curriculum, funding, or the long-term financial sustainability of the hubs and the music and dance scheme, both of which are forced to exist from hand to mouth."
He warned of "real danger of terminal damage to the entire music ecosystem, which depends totally on the ability of talented young musicians to be able to progress from their earliest years to the start of their careers" which needed "understanding from government and a co-ordinated, strategic approach."
He said it was clear what needed to be done: "We need someone to take overall responsibility. We need to establish long-term commitments to and sustainable funding of the hubs and the MDS. We need action on the curriculum and we need to make music an attractive profession for young people to enter, which means sorting out touring visas and ensuring we have a proper copyright regime in place to tackle the threat of AI."
The full text of the debate, including the Minister's reply, is here.
AI and the news media
Guy introduced a short debate on the impact of AI on the sustainability of the news media (7th July). He said that "AI poses an existential threat to independent media because of the way it scrapes their high-quality content without either attribution or payment to those who created it", which he called "an act of theft directly threatening the provision of quality news and the jobs of thousands of reporters". He asked the Minister (Baroness Twycross) whether she was aware that "research by market leader Cloudflare shows that, for example, for every 73,000 pages of content scraped by Anthropic’s AI crawlers from news providers, there is just one single referral back to publishers’ websites? Does she realise that without this vital traffic, publishers cannot sell advertising or subscriptions, and their businesses become unsustainable?" And he warned - following up on previous debates on the Data Act 2025 - "the free press cannot wait years for copyright reform because there is nothing left to protect."
The full text of the debate, including Baroness Twycross's reply, can be found here.
Alaa Abd el Fattah
In an urgent question granted by the Lord Speaker on 4th June, Guy raised the urgent case of the plight of Egyptian blogger Alaa Abd el Fattah who has been unlawfully detained in prison in Egypt since September 2024, and whose mother is now gravely ill in London on hunger strike in protest against the treatment of her son.
He said: "I am sure the thoughts of the whole House will be with the courageous Dr Soueif, who lies gravely in hospital as a result of the incredibly brave stand she is taking to secure the release of her son, whose detention in Egypt has been found by the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention to be in breach of international law."
Thanking the Minister and the Government for all they are doing to secure his release, he asked: "The Prime Minister’s direct intervention with President Sisi is very welcome, but given the extreme urgency of this tragic situation and the ongoing, deliberate violation of the UK’s consular rights, is it not clear that words are no longer sufficient? Will the Government now consider further concrete measures, including targeted sanctions, revising FCO travel guidance relating to Egypt, and proceedings in the International Court of Justice to secure the immediate release of Alaa Abd el Fattah and bring comfort to his mother in what may be her final hours?"
The full debate, including the Minister's reply, is here.
Impact of VAT on school fees
Introducing a short debate on behalf of Lord Lexden on the impact of VAT on school fees, Guy highlighted how "documents released during legal action against the Government over the imposition of VAT midway through the academic year revealed that Ministers were warned by officials that theirs would be the most disruptive option for the implementation of this vindictive policy" and asked: "why did they callously ignore that advice?"
He pointed out that Ministers were also consistently warned by the sector that their assessment that there would be hardly any impact on independent schools was "ludicrously optimistic" and said: "Now, the DfE’s own statistics show a drop of 11,000 in independent school numbers, four times that predicted by the Government, with boarding schools hit twice as hard." He asked the Minister (Baroness Smith) whether she was "not ashamed of the Government’s appalling failure to listen to advice? Will she say sorry to the schools that have inevitably closed, to the people who have lost their jobs and, above all, to those students whose lives have been so cruelly disrupted?"
The full debate is here.
ENDS
