26th February 2025
Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy, gathering the crumbs from the table
Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy, was last week showered in plaudits for announcing investment of £270 million into the cultural sector. The occasion was the 60th anniversary of Jennie Lee’s landmark White Paper, A Policy for the Arts: The First Steps, published in 1965, which set the framework for the establishment of Arts Council England, regional arts boards and investment in arts and education.
Lee’s paper was undoubtedly significant. What is equally significant is that no Labour government since has produced a further White Paper on culture, or given it such prominence. The only government White Paper on Culture to emerge in the last 60 years in fact came from the Tories, in 2016, when Ed Vaizey was briefly Culture Secretary.
Vaizey’s paper, given its Tory provenance, was not a bad stab at summarising the cultural landscape at the time but did not come with the necessary cash to follow through with any significant change. Also, coming up against the buffers of the Brexit debate, the debacle of the Boris Johnson government and the pandemic, it had little chance of making any headway.
Nandy’s announcement was accompanied by a press release quoting a wide range of luminaries from the cultural sector falling over themselves to welcome the new money. You can find it here https://www.gov.uk/government/news/major-investment-to-boost-growth-and-cement-britains-place-as-cultural-powerhouse
The general view across the cultural world is to be thankful for any investment that comes along. However, it would have been good to see a more critical view, deploring the paltry sum as merely crumbs from the Cabinet table, which will barely scratch the surface of what the cultural sector needs to survive, let alone thrive. Much of the announced investment will go to further rounds of existing capital programmes, for which the cultural sector has to compete and secure local authority match funding. Given the devastating impact of Tory austerity on local government finance over the past 14 years that will be a challenge.
In any event, such funding largely goes to retain existing infrastructure and does nothing to support the revenue streams needed to sustain actual creative work in such spaces. Funding channelled through Arts Council England and National Lottery are, in any case, only part of the cultural funding landscape. Much community investment in activity in the cultural sector has been through local authorities. However, the requirement to maintain a library service is the only cultural responsibility local councils have which has a statutory basis. That means cultural budgets have been hammered as Councils are forced into prioritising areas of adult and children’s social care, where they have clear statutory obligations.
It is no surprise that access to culture for working class communities is being choked off or that the majority of those currently working in the cultural sector have had the privilege of a private education. A recent Guardian survey shows that “…17.5% of artistic directors and more than a quarter (26%) of Chief Executives went to Oxford or Cambridge, compared with less than 1% of the general public.” This narrowing of the life experience of those working in the sector inevitably narrows the range of cultural output. The same survey also found that, since 2010, enrolment in arts GCSEs has fallen by 40% and the number of arts teachers declined by 23%, areas where working class children may have been able to access the arts.
The latest challenge to the sector comes from the potential change to Britain’s copyright laws in order for AI companies to harvest creative work without permission, acknowledgement or payment. The proposal has been out to consultation and has met with a robust response from the Creative Rights in AI Coalition, but for a government which claims to be serious about stating that,
“Arts and culture are a vital part of our first-class creative industries and are a key part of what makes Britain so great.”
this proposal should not even be on the table.
Labouring under the delusion that investment will unlock private sector money for regional cultural activity Nandy claimed,
“Small amounts of government money can unlock much larger sums. Over the last decade and a half, we’ve seen philanthropy step in to fill the gap that’s been lost from some government funding. But the problem is so much of that has been targeted towards a handful of major institutions, mostly in London.”
This is clearly wishful thinking of the highest order. If the Culture Secretary is serious about getting investment into the sector in a way that will make significant change she will need to go into arms manufacturing.
In another part of the government forest it is possible to find the UK support for Ukraine: factsheet, which identifies £12.8 billion which has been committed to Ukraine, £7.8 billion of which is for military support. It can be found in full here https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/uk-support-to-ukraine-factsheet/uk-support-to-ukraine-factsheet
To suggest that this dwarfs Lisa Nandy’s £270 million is not only an understatement, it is a scandal. That the Labour leadership have been actively supporting the right wing nationalists in Kyiv is bad enough but that billions are being poured into that support, at the expense of the vital needs of working class communities, is scandalous.
The list of possible ways to spend £12.8 billion is long, from hospitals to schools to green infrastructure to housing. However, there is no reason why culture should not be on that list too. Even within the constraints of a capitalist economy there are political choices to be made. The government’s prioritising of weapons of destruction over creativity is another stark example of where those choices can go badly wrong.
Keir Starmer’s announcement that military spending will rise to 2.5% of GDP by 2027, by robbing the foreign aid budget, adds to the pressure upon other budgets aimed at addressing social issues. The pursuit of war rather than peace presents a danger to all.
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