When Keir Starmer spoke at Guildhall School of Music and Drama this week, promising to place the arts at the centre of a Labour government, the fact that he had made the speech at all was more remarkable than the detail of what he said. Particularly since, as is customary from the Labour leader and his senior team, the speech was short on detail. Starmer promised that the school curriculum would be reviewed to end the downgrading of arts subjects – absent as they are from the Tories’ EBacc. He promised to support freelancers’ rights, crack down on ticket touting and improve access to creative apprenticeships. That was more or less it.
Except that it wasn’t. The substance of the speech was in the language. Starmer was speaking without a hint of embarrassment about things from which Labour has often flinched. He spoke about playing the flute in his childhood – of all the effete-sounding instruments! – and talked about the arts as something enriching, personal, transformational. “Everyone here will know that feeling,” he said. “Of losing yourself, and finding something new in that space art creates. These encounters with art and culture change us for ever. They certainly changed me for ever.”
