It’s no secret now that the Tories want to destroy the arts in Britain, penalise their practitioners and discourage those who would dare to dream of studying them, irrespective of the minimal financial reward. And the Tories are doing this either through ignorance, a simple failure to understand that the arts have a value beyond the monetary or as a deliberate attempt to silence people who can see through the all-pervading language of lies that is thieves’ cant of the current Conservative party and its client media. Maybe looking for a motive is to dignify the current Conservative crop with an intelligence it just doesn’t have. Worms are chopped by the plough, but the plough means them no harm. Brexit Britain is that plough. Artists are those worms. And Nadine Dorries is a woman crouching at the side of the field, watching the plough, while doing a massive shit in the nest of a rare bird.
It is never too often to remind everyone that when he was culture secretary, spivvy Sajid Javid indefensibly encouraged ticket touts, whom he viewed as legitimate entrepreneurs annoying the chattering middle classes, to profiteer from reselling publicly subsidised tickets at higher rates, defeating the whole point of trying to make the arts accessible. And Javid’s eventual successor, Oliver Dowden, declared his love for “commercial theatre”, becoming the first culture secretary to define a genre of art simply by its ability to make money rather than by its composition in relation to style, form and content, as had previously been standard. Personally, I like commercial flowers, such as roses and geraniums for example, as wild flowers disgust me, lolling around in the laybys of rural B-roads like Gypsies. However, in the post-Dorries days, we look back at these two culture compost bags as moral and intellectual titans of taste. We never had it so good!
