Alberto Costa, the Conservation MP for South Leicestershire debated on Wednesday 30 April the British Museum Act of 1963 in relation to the Parthenon Marbles. 

Westminster Hall debates enable backbench MPs from any party to raise an issue, and receive a response from the government. They do not involve a vote on a particular action or decision. Instead, the aim is to: raise awareness of an issue, often as part of a wider campaign, seek to influence government policy, put the views of backbench MPs, opposition parties, and the government on record.

The debate on the Parthenon Marbles started at 11:00 am on Wednesday 30 April, and took place in the Grand Committee Room, the second chamber of the House of Commons. 

 Alberto Costa began: "I beg to move, that this House has considered the Parthenon marbles and the British Museum Act 1963.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Vickers. I declare at the outset that I am the chair of the all-party parliamentary group for Greece.

I am here today not for Greece but for my South Leicestershire constituents—who, like the constituents of many colleagues, are highly cultured people—and for all British people, who I think could benefit from a deal with Greece on the Parthenon marbles. The discussion about the Parthenon marbles, which reside in the British Museum, is very well known. I want to highlight at the outset that this is not a debate about the background to how the British Museum acquired these marbles, nor is it a debate about apportioning blame or arguing that the British Museum, its trustees or the British people have some form of moral responsibility to return these artefacts.

The sole and exclusive purpose of this debate is to put forward a proposition to benefit my South Leicestershire constituents and the constituents of all MPs across the United Kingdom, on whether a new and positive opportunity has presented itself to the United Kingdom, having left the European Union, to decide how it wishes to forge stronger relationships with each EU member state."

The Telegraph reported on this debate the day before stating that Mr Costa was looking for ways to entice cultural cooperation with regards to the Parthenon Marbles. He suggested that a request could be made  to the Acropolis Museum to wave the entrance fee for British visitors. That Greece offered rotating exhibitions of Greek treasures not yet yet seen outside of Greece and these could be shared across a umber of British museums. He was keen that no blame be proportioned nor that there was the need to rewrite history, but he felt it was about seizing post-Brexit opportunities for both the UK and Greece by embarking on "friendship, mutual respect and imagination in cultural cooperation."

During the debate, Mr Costa went on to ask four questions addressed to Sir Chris Bryant, the Minister for Creative Industries, Art and Tourism. Sir Chris Bryant is the Labour MP for Rhondda and Ogmore, and has been an MP continually since 07 June 2001. He currently holds the Government posts of Minister of State (Department for Culture, Media and Sport), and Minister of State (Department for Science, Innovation and Technology).

 Minister Bryant responded at length, including stating: "The important point that I am trying to clarify—because I think there has been some misunderstanding—is that under existing law, it would be impossible for there to be a permanent or indefinite loan. The trustees would be required, in seeking a licence to export, to show that they were absolutely certain that the items were returning. I do not think that would be easy if they had arranged a permanent or indefinite loan —the point being that we would have to change the law. Member may ask is whether we are intending to change the law. We have no intention to change the law."

Emily Hauser considers the long debate of the Parthenon Marbles as she reviews A.E. Stallings Frieze Frame: How poets, painters, and their friends framed the debate around Elgin and the Marbles of the Parthenon.  

Emily writes in the TLS: "Frieze Frame is lucidly brilliant, learned read that wears its learning lightly, inviting the reader into a coterie of artists and intellectuals, traced and  uncovered with a poet's touch. While the occasionally erratic leaps back and forth between different periods in the Marbles' history can take a while to grasp, Stallings is at her best when she is bringing together her incisive poetic criticism with attention to etymologies, intertexts and interactions in the history of ideas. Combining the vice of a poet and rigour of a scholar, she delivers a contribution to a keen and pointed debate and an extended  mediation on the emotion of language and poetry that responds to art. The web of allusions woven across the Marbles gives a tight cast of characters to the tale, where many of the players in the story - not only Elgin, Byron and Keats, but also Constantine P. Cavafy and Melina Mercouri, Greece's first female minister of culture and sports - are interlinked across centuries-old narrative that repeatedly turns back on itself. Particularly valuable is Stallings's attention (she is , after all, an acclaimed translator of Greek) to the Greek as well as the Ottoman evidence, beyond poets to letter and travel writers, once again unravelling the long history of the debate about the Marbles, and the many voices at stake."

Emily visits the British Museum after reading Frieze Frame and once in the Parthenon Galleries she writes that her eyes were drawn "not only to the sculptural reliefs of the Parthenon frieze and metopes, but also to the story of damage that they represent in the violent prising of these stones from the building to which they belonged."

Is it poetry, and not necessarily politics that may provide a strategy to effect change?

To read Emily Hauser's article in full, visit the TLS.

To order A.E. Stallings Frieze Frame: How poets, painters, and their friends framed the debate around Elgin and the Marbles of the Parthenon, check most online book stores including Waterstones.  

We are also reminded of Stuart O'Hara, a BCRPM member's review of A.E. Stallings words in the Hudson Review, written in October 2023.

Stallings’ article is hefty – 110 very readable pages – and should be published as a standalone pamphlet. If that were to happen, it would surely be the best survey of the Marbles debate for the general reader since Christopher Hitchens’ The Parthenon Marbles: The Case for Reunification which came out in 1997, and the third edition published by Verso was launched at Chatham House by BCRPM in May 2008. To finish, here’s what CP Cavafy, probably the most famous Greek after Pericles to appear in this article and one who was raised in the UK, in Liverpool, wrote in the lengthy letters page debate started by Harrison’s Nineteenth Century polemic:

'It is not dignified in a great nation to reap profit from half-truths and half-rights; honesty is the best policy, and honesty in the case of the Elgin Marbles[sic] means restitution.'

Pope Francis died on Easter Monday morning, 21 April 2025, at his residence in the Vatican's Casa Santa Marta.

"God’s mercy is our liberation and our happiness. We live for mercy, and we cannot afford to be without mercy. It is the air that we breathe. We are too poor to set any conditions. We need to forgive, because we need to be forgiven.”

Many saw him on Easter Sunday across news bulletin broadcasts throughout the globe, his final Urbi et Orbi blessing on Easter Day from the central Loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica. Pope Francis spoke slowly, his shallow breath noticeable. From his blessing on the balcony of St Peter's Square, he also continued to greet and bless the cheering crowds as he was driven in his popemobile.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on 17 December 1936 and was the eldest of five children. His parents fled their native Italy to escape Mussolini's dictatorship.

In his sermons, Pope Francis called for social inclusion and criticised governments that failed to pay attention to the poorest in society: "We live in the most unequal part of the world," he said, "which has grown the most, yet reduced misery the least."

As Pope, he made great efforts to heal the thousand-year rift with the Eastern Orthodox Church. In recognition, for the first time since the Great Schism of 1054, the Patriarch of Constantinople attended the installation of a new Bishop of Rome.

In 2023, he made a pilgrimage to South Sudan, pleading with the country's leaders to end the conflict.

Despite cutting down his workload post his time in hospital this year, the Pope was able to meet King Charles during the British monarch's four-day state visit to Italy at the beginning of April.

Despite his critics, Pope Francis did bring change. "If I had to choose between a wounded Church that goes out on to the streets and a sick, withdrawn Church, I would choose the first."

Statement issued by the Acropolis Museum, 22 April 2025:

The President, the Board of Directors and the General Director of the Acropolis Museum, also express their deepest sorrow at the death of Pope Francis, adding their sincere gratitude for his practical support in the just cause, the reunification of the Parthenon sculptures. A support that can be mirrored by others also.

In Rome, two years ago, on Tuesday 07 March 2023, the Vatican and Greece signed the papers for the return of three sculpture fragments from the Parthenon that have been in the collection of the Vatican Museums for two centuries.

Here's to Pope Francis' magnanimous gesture for the reunification of the Parthenon Marbles being mirrored by those institutions that continue to hold fragments of this peerless collection of sculptures.

Anti-reunifiers have over the years indeed centuries summoned up a fair old array of objections against the reuinification of the Parthenon Marbles (all, not just those in the BM) that we of BCRPM have been calling for since the 1980s.

None of them is persuasive, either individually or collectively, but surely the least persuasive of all in 2025 is what might be called the 'nostalgic-cultural' or 'retentionist-nauseous'.

It's therefore deeply disappointing to find that sort of tired 'argument' still being peddled (inaccurately - citing 'Elgin' not Parthenon Marbles) by the recent 'Principles for Restitution' report of the Policy Exchange, and for that report to be headlined by a distinguished Briton of Caribbean heritage, Sir Trevor Phillips.

Antidotes abound, Sir Trevor! Highly recommended is Chris Hitchens's The Parthenon Marbles. The case for reunification.

Professor Paul Cartledge, Vice-Chair of BCRPM campaigning since 1983, and Vice-Chair of the IARPS since 2019

A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture emeritus
University of Cambridge

More on the Policy Exchange report in the Times (14.04.2025), Telegraph and Mail. 

Today, Saturday 12 April 2025 and page 25 of the Telegraph is the Saturday Review featuring Victoria Hislop.

The article covers a great deal on Victoria's life, growing up and as a Mum, her writing (10 novels) and why Victoria became a member of the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles.

Victoria's own special relationship with the British Museum began at school and she explains there were no foreign trips then but a trip to the British Museum was a journey to many exciting places.

"We couldn't afford holidays to Egypt when I was a child - we went to Bognor Regis. So unlike my own children, who got to see culture in the countries, my culture came from the British Museum. I still remember queueing up as a child to see the Tutankhamun exhibition." Says Victoria.

Louise Carpenter writes: 'Hislop's love of the British Museum had already been souring. In 2021, she had joined the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles, which seeks to repatriate them from the museum to the Acropolis Museum in Athens. I'd say Hislop is way more Greek than English. Greece is lucky to have her.'

BCRPM also is lucky to have Victoria as a member. We continue to remember the June 2022 BCRPM protest in the BM when we celebrated the Acropolis Museum's 13th anniversary and Victoria held the cake with candles as the assembled sang happy birthday in English and Greek! 

In Room 18 where the sculptures sold by Lord Elgin in 1816 to Britain are still displayed, Victoria flanked by George Gabriel who masterminded the giant banner,  stood in front of a the 'Reunify the Parthenon Marbles' banner. 

We look forward to the day when the giant banner is held up in the Acropolis Museum's top floor gallery, the Parthenon Gallery and reads: 'Thank you British Museum'. 

Here's to the reunification of the Parthenon Marbles in the Acropolis Museum. Here's to that special day. Here's to hope.

The newly elected Chair of the Swiss Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles, Comité Suisse pour le Retour des Marbres du Parthénon (CSRMP), Professor Cléopatre Montandon with also recently elected Vice-Chair, Patricia van Gene-Saillet drafted a letter for the British Museum's Chair, George Osborne.

This was circulated by Christiane Tytgat the Chair of International Association for the Reunification of the Parthenon Sculptures (IARPS). The majority of the 21 committees representing 19 countries, approved the letter and it was posted a week ago.

Ta Nea, Greece's daily newspaper's UK correspondent, Yannis Andritsopoulos published in today's edition, an article to highlight the letter sent by the IARPS to the British Museum.

Christiane Tytgat was pleased to alert the committees that the Office of Greece's Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis had picked up on the article and voiced delighted with this initiative.

To read the letter,  follow the link here.