TAITMAIL Arts and the future – at last the politicians speak
Despite the ballooning value of the arts and creative industries to our economy – in 2022 they were worth £126bn in gross value added and employed 2.4m people – they never surface in the seemingly endless multi-party televised debates or public focus groups. Scandals like politicians betting on their job prospects take the space.
So on Wednesday the Campaign for the Arts initiative, aided and abetted by What Next? and the Southbank Centre, was refreshing and enthusiastically delivered. They called it the Arts Hustings 2024, presided over by the ballerina turned cultural mandarin Baroness Deborah Bull, and the wisdom of seven politicians was delivered in short mostly 30-second off-the-cuff statements. They were adjured not to attack each other, particularly frustrating for Chris Bryant – “Nobody challenges anybody and challenge is part of political debate” he couldn’t prevent himself from in-putting. How enlightening it was with such limited scope for expansion we shall see.
We had Stephen Parkinson, Conservative and arts minister; Bryant, Labour shadow creative industries minister; Jane Bonham-Carter, Lib Dem culture spokesperson; Claire Hanna of the SDLP; Sian Mulholland of the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland; Jack Lenox, Green Party culture spokesman; and Heledd Fychan, Plaid Cymru’s finance and culture spokesperson.
Bull had organised the programme into the seven headings she, and presumably the Campaign for the Arts and What Next?, sees as central to the current arts political debate: the Arts Council, and as Bryant helpfully pointed out in this context this means Arts Council England, not its counterparts in the other nations; local government; freelances; the disabled; education; higher education; and the broader influence of creativity in society.
This panel was not front line – Labour’s shadow culture secretary is battling a Green challenge in her Bristol constituency while the actual culture secretary is presumably confined in the rabbit hutch where the rest of the Conservative cabinet is chained – meaning that there was less grand-standing than there might have been (though Lord Parkinson had a rather feeble go). It also meant there was a higher degree of agreement than there might have been, so maybe we can get a better idea of what might actually come about.
The Arts Council, for instance. Everyone here said the arm’s length principle should be rigorously maintained and ACE should be able to operate autonomously, but as Bryant pointed out (scrupulously avoiding attacking anyone), it was ministerial interference that caused ACE to come to “crazy decisions… making it completely impossible for ENO to survive in London”. The Tories would continue with its paused Mary Archer review of ACE, and Labour would have a top-to-bottom appraisal to make sure the money is going in the right direction. The role of the Arts Council, Parkinson said, is “to nurture and champion high quality creative work across the country so that everyone has the power to enjoy the life changing qualities of the arts” Parkinson said, adding “and to do it independently of government”.
But as Lady Bonham-Carter observed as trustee of the Lowry Centre in Salford, the lie is rather put to that by the fact that ministerial interference in the Arts Council decision-making has had other, wider, implications. Nadine Dorries as culture secretary telling ACE to cut its funding to London organisations by £24m meant those organisations could no longer tour as they had, and venues like the Lowry, and north-west audiences, are missing out on some of the world’s finest performances.
Trouble is, said Fychan, despite the apparently universal commitment to accessibility, art is becoming elitist simply because more and more people are being costed out of enjoying performances. Arts councils should be a critical friend, said Mulholland, not an extension of government.
Then it was local government, still the biggest funder of the arts and creativity despite a drop of getting on for 50% since 2010 – Lenox, a councillor in Lancashire, has seen his authority’s arts budget shrink by 65%. Again, everyone agreed these cuts are a false economy: Arts UK authoritatively reckons that every £1 spent on the arts earns £4. The Lib Dems want multi-year settlements for councils (Labour would go as far as three-year funding, maybe further), enterprise zones to include cultural projects, regional partnerships and participation in Creative Europe which is dedicated to cross-border co-operation in culture and media. It all needs to be recharged, but according to Plaid Cymru the research they would have to work with is at least ten years out of date. Local authorities may be poor now but often they own property that can be ceded to cultural projects. But what has happened, the Greens say, is that council cuts have meant the first to go are the cultural staff and authorities have lost irreplaceably valuable expertise.
The plight of freelancers became a story in the pandemic, and it’s still on the page. For Bryant the way forward is simple: reform the apprenticeship levy so that it can work in the creative sector, abolish zero hours working, allow touring to Europe and support the BBC – more of a shopping basket than a package. The Tories would abolish National Insurance contributions for the self-employed and would recruit freelancers to Lady Archer’s reconstituted ACE review.
The disabled make up 23% of the population, but their rights across the board are being eroded, no less so in the arts. Again, the response was more wishful thinking than policy – “It’s so important that everybody should be able to play a part” said Parkinson, wistfully. So, not ministerially interfering of course, he would want ACE to up its performances for the disabled, both in creativity and access – Parliament itself, Bryant said, is the worst example being in a building that is almost totally inaccessible to wheelchairs. He wants something done about the spivs that buy up the cut-price theatre tickets for disabled and sell them on at vastly inflated prices.
Education. Everybody wants the arts and creativity in education at every level, though the Tories are not convinced that it all has to happen within school hours. Labour can’t see why only public schools have theatres, art rooms and concert halls, giving kids an introduction to culture that their state-educated mates miss out on – every child, said Bryant, should have the chance of a career in the creative industries, not just the privileged, and that can only happen with creativity at the heart of the curriculum. Fychan said the new Welsh curriculum has creativity right there, but there isn’t the money to specially train the teachers.
And no-one agrees that the “Mickey Mouse” degrees should be dropped: the Alliance Party wants long-term strategic funding for university level courses in all art forms. The Greens’ Lenox bemoaned the “creeping marketisation” in higher education, which means an increase in fees and degrees based wholly on what students might earn afterwards, and he wants tuition fees scrapped and maintenance grants reinstated. Bryant is sick and tired of ministers undermining creative industry courses – one in four of us now work in the creative industries, it’ll be one in ten in five years, “we should be selling that, not undermining it”. For Parkinson, perhaps deliberately missing the point, there are “many other routes” into the creative sector, like flexible apprenticeships.
So what else can creatives do for us? For the Greens they can paint a picture of a future when climate change has been reigned in and we can have an “equitable happy planet”. The Tories see them helping mental health, the economy, tourism, communities and bringing new life into old buildings. For the SDLP in Northern Ireland they are already healing sectarianism. For Labour they can bring theatre into our lives which builds vital self-confidence, particularly in the young. For Plaid they point to a way out of poverty. For Alliance they are productively active in peace and reconciliation.
Everybody agrees that the arts and creativity are chronically underfunded. Nobody has a suggestion for remedying that, but it doesn’t seem to be what Deborah Bull was expecting. What she uncovered was a general agreement on many key areas of the arts and creativity. And if this is not a party matter, is there a workable cross-party plan in here somewhere? Ask me on July 5, 2025.