Politics
May 7 2015
Picture: Twitter
I thought I’d spend a few moments looking at the election here in the UK from the point of view of ‘the arts’. Regular readers may know that I was a Conservative adviser on the arts for some years, during the 2005 election, and the 2010 election. I know the arts minister, Ed Vaizey (above), reasonably well. I may be biased, but I think the Conservatives have been generally good for the arts sector.
First, I think Ed Vaizey has been an excellent arts minister. He has held the job for five years, and that’s provided a useful point of continuity for the sector. Too often, the job of arts minister is seen as a staging post for other jobs, and sometimes ministers don’t even last a year. Ed’s first task in 2010 was to try and persuade the Chancellor, George Osborne, not to savage arts funding in his emergency budget of that year. Although there was a headline cut of 30% for the Arts Council, this was not as bad as many feared, and many other departments fared worse. Major museums were affected similarly, although some ‘only’ had to deal with a 15% cut initially.
Having been involved in trying to ‘sell’ the arts to the Tory leadership in earlier times, I can attest to Ed Vaizey and Jeremy Hunt’s (Hunt was Secretary of State for Culture, before getting the Health job) success, and the difficulty of their challenge. Many Tory politicians, including some of the most senior, think the state should get the hell out of the arts and heritage. Leave it to the market and philanthropists, like they do in the US. That’s misguided, obviously, and it has taken some effort over the last 15 years to get the party to see the benefit of state support for the arts and heritage (and I'm proud to have played a small role in that). Free museum entry, for example, has been steadfastly maintained, when many said the Tories would abolish it. It has also been good for the arts in general that the government has adhered to the ‘arms length principle’, whereby Ministers stump up taxpayer cash, but leave the spending of it to semi-independent arts and heritage professionals. We’ve not seen a return to the ‘instrumentalism’ of New Labour days, when it was thought that the arts could be explicitly used to help health policy, for example.
Then there has been the dramatic benefits brought about by changes to the distribution of National Lottery good cause money. Under Labour, the original formula for distributing this money was altered - reducing it from 20% to 16.6% - and a significant chunk was diverted towards health and education spending. It was Conservative policy from 2005 onwards to reverse this change. Since 2010 this change has brought in over £400m in extra capital funding for the arts and heritage. That’s one of the reasons we’ve seen some excellent museum extensions, and many stellar acquisitions (another change was to allow Lottery funding to be used to acquire objects). Sadly, some museum directors prefer £1m in guaranteed annual funds to the £10m one-off grant they may have to fight for. But there is now unprecedented cash available for museum renovations, acquisitions and extensions.
No other party has said they will retain this increase to arts and heritage capital spending. And we should really commend ministers for seeing through the change. When I first helped draw up this policy in 2005, we commissioned an opinion poll, to see what the public made of the changes. We expected everyone to want to see arts funding rise. But the opposite answer came back; people would rather Lottery money was spent in health and eduction, on cancer machines and the like. We quickly buried the poll. Too often, those lambasting the government for not greatly increasing arts funding forget that there is no widespread popular appetite for such an increase.
So, broadly speaking, it seems to me that the arts have done reasonably well under this government, given the economic backdrop. Those bewailing the cuts must surely understand that it was never going to be the case that the arts would be protected, when, say, the police and health budgets might not. Recently, the director of London’s Wallace Collection, Christoph Vogtherr, launched an extraordinary attack on the government, accusing ministers of “systematically reducing funding and commitments to the arts”. He also convened a debate at the Wallace Collection to discuss “this destructive development”, where he made many gloomy predictions, warning of a wholesale ‘privatisation’ of the arts, the return of admission fees, and even the destruction and sale of paintings.
A nationally funded museum has never been used in such a political way, and I thought it was a muddled intervention. It was noticeable that few other national museum directors came to his support. While it is true that the Wallace’s annual ‘grant-in-aid’ has shrunk by about a third (from £4.2m in 2010/11 to £3m in 2013/14) the scale of the reduction is no worse than that endured by other government bodies. It is simply wrong to suggest that cuts in the UK are due to a ‘systematic’, Tory targeting of the arts. After all, Ed Miliband has explicitly said there is no more money for the arts (though he has said, splendidly, that he wants to get more art out of London museum basements, and lent to regional museums).
Then there is the uncomfortable truth that, despite the Wallace’s reduced grant, the museum actually has more income than ever before. In the first year of this government, the Wallace’s total income was £6.8m; last year it was £8.12m. The same is true for a surprising number of museums; grant-in-aid has declined, but overall income has risen. Even the Guardian, following on from a National Campaign for the Arts survey, had to concede recently: "One of the indicators that has risen most is the earned income of arts organisations."
Why? Because museums and arts organisations have been forced to go out and shake the tin - and have found that it works. In other words, the best response to government cuts is to try something different - not just whinge about it. As the Wallace coyly admits in its accounts, last year it enjoyed ‘a successful year of self-generated income’; restaurant takings, trading income and donations all rose. Visitor numbers are at a record level. The Collection’s major galleries have been refurbished for the first time in 30 years. The place is in better shape than it has ever been. But listening to Vogtherr, you’d think Isis were advancing down Oxford St.
I was surprised to see that Vogtherr’s remarks drew no response from the government. No. 10 (and the Tory campaign chief, Lynton Crosby) long ago decreed that ministers can talk only about the economy; there are no votes in museums. It was “long term economic plan” or nothing. The Conservative’s positive work in the arts (DCMS, by the way, never had any Lib Dem ministers) must thus be sacrificed to the most boring election slogan in history.
Here, then, is the real problem when it comes to arts funding, which I'm afraid is going to be under further pressure in the next parliament. Despite the view of those inside the sector, ‘the arts’ do not rank highly among the public when it comes to allocating government spending. That’s why local government can get away with outrageous cuts to regional museum budgets. Ultimately, I'm afriad this is the fault of those in the arts who have failed to make the wider case for public support. Government can't do everything.
Update - it's a massive Tory victory! I thought it would be much closer, and even suspected we'd get a Labour administration with support from other parties. The pollsters were way out, the poor Lib Dems are toast, and here in Scotland, the prospect of a second referendum has been almost a dead certainty. But the big question of course is; who will be the next Culture Secretary and Arts Minister?
Update II - in fact, the bigger question is; will there continue to be a seperate culture ministry?
