Christina Patterson: We have to get creative about Britain's best export

When a Yorkshire parson gave his children a set of wooden soldiers, he can't have known what he would unleash. First, there were games, then there were stories, and then hundreds of handwritten books. There was a kingdom called Gondal, and then a gypsy called Heathcliff, and then a governess called Jane. And then, 154 years after two books were published by two sisters under the names of two men, there was yet another film of Wuthering Heights, and yet another film of Jane Eyre, and yet another play about the daughters of the parson, all in the course of a week.

It's unlikely that the sisters thought, while wandering over the moors, or stitching samplers, or scribbling in those tiny books, that what they were doing, when they dreamt of love, and passion, and a glowering presence who seems very much like the glowering presence in Alistair Darling's new memoir, was spawning a "creative industry". People with the power to create characters and stories that live on in the minds, and hearts, and films, and songs, and ballets, and paintings, and poems, of other people, tend not to call themselves "creative". They tend to think that people who call themselves "creative", and particularly people who call themselves "a creative", and particularly people who think that "a creative" should dress in a certain way, are the kinds of people who think that what you need to have an interesting thought is brightly coloured carpets and bean bags.

But whether they knew it or not, they did start an industry, an industry that began with books, which sold, and sold, and went on selling, and continued with coach trips to a parsonage, and cream teas, and biscuits. And so, 40 years before, did a young woman in another vicarage, who also scribbled poems and stories to amuse her family, and then started writing about truths universally acknowledged, and single men in search of a wife. And so did a young man who left his family to be an actor in London, and knocked off plays to pay their rent. Plays which, 500 years on, are still the most widely performed works of art in the world.

Long before the "creative industries" were called the "creative industries", they were Britain's best export. Now that we've pretty much lost coal, and steel, and ships, and textiles, they remain our best export, and one of the few reliable sources of national pride. We love our sportsmen because it's the nearest we get to religion to love our sportsmen, but it's not a love that's often rewarded by results. In our poems, and plays, and novels, and musicals, and TV and radio, we lead, or at least vie with those who lead, the world.

So, three cheers, since we're talking British pride, for the shadow Culture Secretary who has decided that if you're wandering like a Brontë on a moor, or a Lear on a heath, semi-blinded by the blasts of an economic storm that shows no sign of abating, it might be worth thinking about how to do something you know you can do even better. He has decided that if you have an industry which already accounts for about 7 per cent of GDP, and employs about 800,000 people, but you think it could employ more, and account for more, and particularly when the financial services sector, which is Britain's biggest industry, is looking a little bit shaky, then what you need is some expert advice.

The shadow Culture Secretary, who's called Ivan Lewis, which is a name you can't easily mispronounce, would probably love to spend more money on the "creative" sector, but even the party whose last leader seriously thought that last year's election could be about "investment versus cuts" now realises that there isn't an awful lot of money around for investment. He also seems to have realised that if you want to get rich people to put their money into something, and keep it in something, then you probably have to appeal to the thing that might well have got them rich in the first place. You probably have to appeal, in other words, to their greed.

This, presumably, is why he will announce today that he has appointed as an adviser a man who has made about £500m out of helping people with a lot of money make more. The man is called Patrick McKenna, and he runs a banking group called Ingenious, which has advised Simon Fuller on his media company, Robbie Williams on a £50m record deal with EMI, and part financed films like Avatar. We are not talking spinsters in a parsonage or poets in a garret.

But we are talking about a man who knows a lot about business, and a lot about the media, and a lot about the music industry, and we are talking a sector which includes computer games, advertising and design as well as performing arts, publishing, film and fashion. He may, for example, realise that if you want long-term growth in an area then you need long-term investment, and if you want people not just to build a business to sell it out, almost certainly to an American player, then what you need is proper incentives, and a plan. Those might be incentives like the ones that have lured quite a lot of Hollywood production to the UK, or like those that meant that writers, artists and rock stars who lived, at least some of the time, in Ireland, paid little or no tax. They will certainly be incentives that take into account the fact that not all "creative industries" can get by with paper and a pen.

Some people, and particularly people in the Labour party, might not like the idea of anyone paying less tax. They might think a tax cut is one thing for a Brontë, and another for a Bono. And they might well be right. But they might also remember what poets and artists have always known: that anything, including a tax policy, can be a symbol. Ireland's tax exemption scheme was designed to send a message to the world about the value of art to its culture. A British "creative industries" scheme could do the same.

It might also send a message to the children in this country, who may not see a future that looks all that hopeful, that there's something we all have access to, which might or might not make us richer, but which will make sure we're never, ever bored. You don't have to buy it. You don't have to steal it. You don't even have to pick it up. You could, if you liked fancy phrases, call it "creative capital". Or you could just call it the imagination.

c.patterson@independent.co.uk;