Good morning. Three weeks ago, the body that decides arts funding in England cut £50m worth of grants in London in order to support organisations outside the capital. It chopped English National Opera’s grant from £12.5m a year to zero, instead offering it £17m over three years to move, possibly to Manchester. On Tuesday, hundreds of artists and culture workers congregated outside the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport to protest against those decisions. “The government has done nothing to nurture us,” the actor Zainab Hasan said, “and everything to destroy what makes our industry brilliant.”
Enraged though the demonstrators are, their appeals are likely to be ignored – and the funding decisions by Arts Council England will radically alter the cultural landscape. To their defenders, that is levelling up in action, an overdue rebalancing of a system that has always prioritised London. But critics argue that the changes are a zero-sum attack on some of Britain’s most important cultural institutions that will leave everybody poorer.
