Simon TaitSpeaking in Broken SoulLabour's arts policyThis is what Tessa Jowell put on the website before the Labour conference this year, as a context for what her Department of Culture, Media and Sport is supposed to be doing:
Spot the arts. Grasping what Labour's arts policy is is a bit like catching a fly. It's elusive, and the only way of getting a hold is to approach it from an unexpected angle, so I'll try. Tessa Jowell put her finger partly on it the other day when I asked her why ministers refused to let it be known that they attended arts events - you never see cabinet members photographed at the opera or theatre, though they're only too happy to be snapped at football matches, even cricket. They do go, she said. She sees them there all the time, but the problem is, and I quote her directly: "There's no political language of the soul". Aesthetics, in other words, is the passion that dare not speak its name in government circles. This is about Labour's arts policy but it's hard to get any kind of angle on it without a look at what went before. Arts policy is a fairly alien notion in government terms. The Tories were unashamed about why they persisted with the subsidy: it was traditional and without it there would be no Royal Opera House, no National Theatre, no National Gallery, the international badges of respectability. Thatcher had an arts minister, but he was a junior education minister with a mini-department called the Office of Arts and Libraries and a staff of about five. It was a job for those on the way out of government, people of largely blameless service but; nice gents, mostly, Richard Luce, Tim Renton. And Grey Gowrie, of course, good name for a Tory arts minister, who resigned because he couldn't live on the salary and became chairman of Sotheby's instead, a natural move. Then came David Mellor, Major's choice, who did take the arts seriously - he was on the board of the LPO and the ENB for a start - who was a heading for the Home Office, he thought, but meanwhile got into the Cabinet by upping the status of the OAL to the Department of National Heritage, his Ministry of Fun. He took the arts seriously, but still presided over the first actual cut in funding for the Arts Council, a body he had no sympathy for. He secretly wanted to abolish it but was moved out before he could, after being a little more creative with his fun than even Major's bastards could abide, and we had a trail of heritage secretaries with the same qualifications as the old arts ministers - occupying the seat by the way out door - Peter Brooke, Stephen Dorrell, Virginia Bottomley. They brought in the lottery, Mellor's baby, with five "good causes" as beneficiaries all of which the arts could benefit from. It transformed arts funding making it complicated, confused and often misguided. The government were so self conscious about their arts funding record that that bent over backwards to make it clear that the lottery money was not to be used to "replace" government funding - even where there hadn't been any before. Words like additionality and hypothecation were assiduously learned and repeated. The result was that money was promised for capital developments, not revenue, while revenue funding was kept at the same beggarly level; so we had the prospects of fantastic new buildings in which no-one could afford to perform. And suddenly there was so much money, something like £3b a year, that no-one had the faintest idea what to do with it all. The Chief Secretary to the Treasury whispered to Mrs Bottomley that it would be a good idea if lottery endowments could be made to arts organisation instead of subsidy. "The Opposition would milk the broken promises theme for everything they can get" she restored. And they did anyway. By the end of 1995 a succession of curious shadow heritage secretaries - Jack Cunningham, Mo Mowlam, even, briefly, Peter Mandelson - ended with Chris Smith, the first to admit shyly that he not only liked the arts, he wrote poetry and had a PhD in Romantic literature. To go back again, for the 92 election the shadow arts minister, Mark Fisher, had got £1m from Paul Hamlyn to create an arts manifesto. It looked at each art form, but the catchwords were the same: "enabling", "access", "vision", "quality" - words that mean absolutely nothing to artists and was pretty much ignored in the press. That was still as near to an official arts policy at Labour had got when Smith got the portfolio, but he had been told by his leader to prepare a policy paper on the arts. It had pretty much been done when Tony Blair came back from a visit to Australia where he'd been talking to the Labour PM Paul Keating about Creative Nation, and A$250m survey. "My neat little paper was all ready and he came back to say we weren't thinking big enough, the arts were much more fundamentally important to community life and we should look more along the lines of Keating's policy" Smith said. It's from there that the basis of current arts policy began. It turned out that the thinking was closely allied to lottery changes, but he wanted arts and heritage lottery grants aimed more strategically at community projects, to revive music teaching in schools, tax breaks for the film industry, free student access, special national funding for strategic regional museums. That was in 1995, still a couple of years to go before anything concrete could emerge, and it was some time after that - after much grappling with the Treasury, he revealed later - that positive results started to emerge. He had no immediate control over the Treasury subvention, that would take a little longer than the first Parliament, but the lottery was in his control and he got rid of the Tory paranoia about rules to deflect accusations of additionality which made it almost impossible to get a grant. Flexibility, he said, was the way, and he encouraged the Arts Council and Heritage Lottery Fund to look for non-capital building projects that create a proper stock of musical instruments or children to borrow, for commercial training of arts administrators, for community schemes for performances and exhibitions - the famous "Village Hall Policy". "The arts fire the imagination, inspire the intelligence and solace the heart" he said; cultural activity was to go to the people, not the other way round; the arts were a potential economic dynamo, a key element which was Smith's secret weapon with the Treasury which was also to become a millstone: "The arts and cultural activity alone turn over more than £12b a year and return a substantial positive balance on our trading account" he said. And creativity had to be got back into education. And he got a boost from the prime minister in 1998 when he had a bundle of arts panjandrums for a reception at No 10 and told them: "We must write arts into our core script". That wouldn't necessarily wash much with the Chancellor, though. "Music and beauty is not what lights his fire" Smith told me recently, "it's hard figures." So he used the economy argument relentlessly, and in a relatively short period of time managed to get a complete reversal of the drip--drip devastation of year- by-year real term cuts under the Tories by winning a 60% increase, £200m, in the 2001-2004 triennial. The difference this has made has been astonishing. In June when a group of arts leaders - Serota, Hytner, Hall, Kelly and so on - gathered the press together to launch a plea for the government not to dump on the arts this time round, they said that between 2000 when government arts funding began its dramatic turnaround and 2004 more than 1,000 arts organisations had funding restored and national museum attendances have increased by over 50% since 1989, thanks largely to the introduction of free admission. And Dennis Stevenson said "This isn't about money. It's what the arts can and have achieved since the government gave it substantially more money, and what it can go on to do if that funding is continued". So in 2001 it all looked pretty good, and Chris Smith went into the general election with an impressive record - the longest serving arts minister, the only one to have one increases from the Treasury. So naturally he was sacked in the post-election shuffle, and our own Tessa Jowell was given his job. It's not clear why Smith had to go - he did, after all, appear to reflect the government view - but the usual "gone native" rumours circulated, suggesting he was starting to step out of the circle. What is clear is that he didn't like the Dome debacle and washed his hands of it early on, so that Mandelson had to take it on. And sports matters, the non-appearance of a world class athletics stadium and more poignant the Wembley Stadium mess. He was hurt by it at the time but is now in charge of one of the most important developments of post- 2001. The Clore Cultural Leadership Programme, of which I can tell you more if you want. Connected with it now is an Arts Council leadership programme which the Treasury has given £12m and which was launched by Brown himself at No 10. It was Brown who said that the arts had not just developed a £12b turnover, but had earned £11b clear for the economy, making it the most valuable earner after financial services. So the question now is why there is still a debate? Why does the Arts Council, with which the government has always had a difficult relationship (I can tell you more about that if you want) have to keep getting rows over funding? What has happened is that while the arts are acknowledged as generally popular now, they have been used by government departments like Education, Home Office, Employment, as tools for other social ends - to the irritation of Tessa Jowell who two years ago felt the need to publish a pamphlet about valuing art for arts sake, not for how it can get kids off the streets, brighten hospital wards or amuse prisoners. Art is now established a catalyst for urban regeneration for its own sake, but when wars break out and Olympic Games are won, the money has to come form somewhere and guess where. Protest as Tessa might, politicians still can't bring themselves to stand up in Cabinet for the arts and know that they won't be reshuffled as a result. It comes down to what I started with: there is no political language of the soul. |
| ||
|