The parties’ manifestos wax long about areas their leaders think are important for national life — from tax and spending, to defence, pensions and energy. Fervent, if moveable, are commitments on immigration and crime reduction.
When it comes to the arts and culture, however the joint efforts ring as hollow as the Fool’s eggshell in King Lear. This came home to me when, on the panel of Radio 4’s Any Questions last week, we were asked to cite something in the manifestos that was missing or a good idea, regardless of our own politics.
Suddenly, it struck me that despite having covered the campaign trail over the last month, I had not heard any senior figure give any detail or signal enthusiasm for the place of the arts and culture in the great national reboot.
Most of all, as someone who grew up hundreds of miles from London and benefited from visits of national theatre and opera companies and (like Keir Starmer, state school classical music provision), I had an uneasy feeling over the years that these concerns were now confined to the margins, or left to the inward-looking worlds of arts bureaucrats, who sound as if they talk mainly to each other (because they do).
I have not heard any senior figure give any detail or signal any enthusiasm for arts and culture
As it turned out, a lot of the national audience felt something similar, to judge by my email inbox the next day.
For Labour, there’s a “creative industries sector plan” as part of an “industrial strategy”. What does this mean? Some industries are viable, some are not. Some get subsidised and some don’t and that can be the difference between closing and staying open.
Choices have to be made, it’s completely opaque what is intended. There is one clear idea in the fuzziness: “Labour will improve access to cultural assets by requiring publicly funded national museums and galleries to increase the loans they make from their collections to communities across the country.” By what means?
Lending is an expensive business — who bears the risk and cost when budgets are being cut and regional museums are cutting hours or closing — let alone doing complex loans deals? It’s the arts version of the fantasy maths Rachel Reeves is otherwise trying to kibosh in her ranks.
I have most scepticism about Starmer’s political method when he signals that something is easy or self-evident, which is in fact very hard to deliver and will require either extra funding not in the manifesto — or some new way of delivering it, which is not even hinted at either.
I do believe that his love of classical music as “anything Beethoven really”, having attended the Guildhall School of Music as a teenager, is genuine. I believe too that he would love to see more children today have greater access to many aspects of the arts. But beyond a nostalgic aspiration to revive that, we are left with not much idea of what matters to the Labour leader.
The big question will be whether a complacent Labour establishment simply falls in behind recent Arts Council England moves which have infuriated national arts leaders, by slashing subsidies for established London-based companies (see the ENO’s travails for the full story of cavalier bad policy-making), favouring a wide dispersal of finance to community arts funds which even many Left-leaning arts leaders believe is a diminution of quality with no certain return across the country.
It’s not like Labour has had competition from a shockingly slight Tory manifesto, which relies on the old saw of “unleashing philanthropy” and “world-leading creative industries” which were sustained by Treasury loans in the pandemic — and now left to fend for themselves with no clear strategic sense of purpose.
Shortform: Labour wants arts policy to be a cheap way of joining the dots with its industrial policy, without any broader sense of how to support it or priorities. A dying Tory government is saying: “We gave you dosh in the pandemic — now go talk to a philanthropist.” The Lib Dems’ big idea is to apply for more cultural funding from the EU, which is hardly a failsafe approach given the state of European politics, never mind Brexit — and “creative enterprise zones” shrouded in fiscal fog.
If by now you are thinking that the contenders for power are united in re-upping blurry culture-speak jargon to avoid telling us what they value about the arts, or don’t, and what they really would like to do about it — spot on.
