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!
The arts must survive! I am in the middle of my second week at the Edinburgh fringe. I have seen a man dance with pandas on his hands as cornflakes tumble from his mouth; I have seen a young woman embody the opinions of Kirstie Allsopp in the form of an interpretive dance; I have seen a tiny man hold the attention of hundreds of transfixed passersby by hitting a plastic bucket repeatedly with whatever he could pick up off the pavement; and I have seen a delightful dame sing delicately about dogging at a well-tuned piano, as Cicero would have done, had he been an “Alternative Comedian”. I realise, for many critics, I am not making a cast- iron case for the arts. But suddenly the very act of getting on a stage, paying to see someone get on a stage, or just buying a good book and reading it, seems as subversive as plotting to explode Parliament.
The Tories’ cynically manufactured culture war is currently fought so indiscriminately, and on so many simultaneous fronts, that confused culture warriors are in danger of shooting one another’s nads off in the crossfire, even as everything we hold dear gets napalmed to nothing as collateral damage. Liz Truss superglues her anti-woke intestines back together and Rishi Sunak staples his severed penis to his left buttock, as a screaming would-be poet runs out of a burning English literature course covered in smouldering policy announcements, and client journalists and backbench cannon fodder look on, smoking joints dispassionately and listening to Edwin Starr. Culture war? What is it good for? Keeping the cost of living crisis off the front page of the Times, apparently, and allowing Kwasi Kwarteng to waft around the airwaves pronouncing grimly about things that aren’t even really happening. Again.
Neither Tory leadership hopeful Rishi Sunak, nor the Thirty-Six Hour Education Secretary Michelle Donelan, The One And A Half Days Queen, wants people to study wasteful arts subjects that don’t give students immediate financial reward. They want to deny a working knowledge of our history and culture to all but a privileged redbrick few. Meanwhile, Dorries has given protected status to a small and architecturally undistinguished plaque on an Oxford wall, simply because it commemorates the southern African colonialist Cecil Rhodes. So it is important that we maintain our history and arts after all apparently, but only the racist bits.
And on Wednesday morning, the Times, Britain’s second worst newspaper after the Daily Telegraph, was opportunistically alarmed that university English literature courses are teaching fewer books and warning students not to read them so they learn less, even though that seems to be precisely what Sunak wants. In its original folkloric form, this now old anti-woke news trope maintained that simple economic cuts to the medieval literature module at Leicester University reflected a woke brigade attempt to remove all evidence of the white, heterosexual, medieval male Geoffrey Chaucer’s genius from university courses in case he offended transgender people. Or something.
A two-minute Google showed the Times story to be a product of some fairly substantial spin, perhaps the work of writers lucky enough to have studied fiction at university, with only two books having been actually removed from study nationwide. The modern mania for appending trigger warnings to texts was conflated with the idea of actually removing books. But here in Edinburgh, for example, I could have done with knowing the standup show labelled 12+ contained a lengthy section on masturbating in hospital before taking my 12-year-old in. But come on culture warriors! If you must ruin everything at least display some joined-up thinking! Those of us old enough to remember the 70s recall long-distance car journey windshields splattered with thousands of bugs. There was a background noise of natural abundance all around us that climate change has burned away. The Tories are taking a blow torch to its cultural equivalent just to score points. When it’s gone it’s gone.
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