The middle-class rip-off

Floreat Aula

I pay for policing their football matches, health care and education. This doesnt seem to much to get in return

William Norton

"Dougie Maclean, one of Scotland's more successful fiddlers...."

In an article about rip-offs and subsidies you might want to re-phrase that?

Adrian Hilton

If the arts were not subsidised, the nation's greatest artistic institutions would be confined to staging the exclusively 'popular'. And, sadly, this would no longer be Macbeth. You would end up with Big Brother - the opera, Deal or No Deal staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company, or Neighbours at the National.

The arts have to be subsidised because, unlike your holiday, they are an expression of corporate culture - be it English, British or European. They are worth subsidising because they are worth preserving and reinterpreting for each new generation. And subsidy is the only means by which access may be democratised: it permits school groups to see Fidelio and Hamlet, and it is these students who are our artists/actors/musicians/singers of tomorrow. To limit access is to diminish the potential for inspiration.

Football Fan

Floreat Aula, it is my understanding that it is the football clubs, and by implication the fans (and sponsors), who pay for policing of matches. Having said that I understand the social unrest often caused by a football match as compared with an operatic performance.

With regard to health care and education,as a football fan I also pay my taxes!!

sma

I agree totally with Floreat Aula. We middle class folk pay thousands a year in tax to maintain the ignorant, feckless and unhealthy, and see very little return for it. If stupid poor people want to play the lottery, then let some of the money do generated flow into the more worthwhile arts.

Burton

It's not really a tax. You don't have to buy lottery tickets but you have to pay income, stamp, VAT etc. You can easily avoid buying a lottery ticket.

Anyone with a brain surely knows buying a lottery ticket is going to make you poorer, not richer.

If anything, it's a tax on the gullible.

Max Kaye

The idea of subsidising the 'arts' is inherently flawed and wrong. One man's art is another woman's unmade bed.

If, for example, we're all happy to pay for a Caravaggio, then that's all very well by me. If, on the other hand, you want to use my taxes to pay for 'Brit Art' then I'd rather it was spent on the contents of a pig sty sprayed over the ploughed-in ruins of the Tate Modern.

What? You don't like my taste? Well, that's my point.

cityboozer

I would like to agree with FA and sma but I'm afraid that I cannot. The middle-class contains an awful lot of hard-working, law-abiding taxpayers who are feeling the squeeze and who are not even remotely interested in High Art. Some of their tastes may be just a little naff or even proletarian but these are the people whose taxes are being squandered.

Your opera-going metropolitan class is slightly concerned to protect its lifestyle but there are an awful lot of us out here who are actually worried about their living and providing for our families.

It is not the lager-drinking football-watching types who subsidise your opera (at least in the sense that that class isn't now universal). It's the tired-looking people who attend the same parents' evenings as you in an older car. It's the ones who work twice as hard with their kids because they cannot quite afford the fees for a local independent school where they know their child will be educated properly in a safe environment with other nice kids.

Britain is producing some of the world's best chefs. Well-off Londoners benefit from this but eating at Michelin-starred restaurants is still a jolly expensive hobby. Where is the Culinary Council to spend half a billion a year on subsidising Blumenthal? Would Ramsay have gone from chef to a international entrepreneur if he'd had a stipend from the British Council?

cjcjc

Glyndebourne is private.
The New York Met, Chicago Lyric, SF Opera are private.
Opera can survive without public subsidy.

Hysteria

seems to me that many benefit from lottery funding (look at Beijing for other examples outside the arts) - the sad thing is that by their nature lotteries remove the work ethic from society and replace it with a "let's get lucky approach" to life

Sideliner

The reference to the "Yes Minister" episode "The Middle Class Rip-Off" is particularly appropriate as it dealt (quite superbly IMHO) with precisely this point. The plot centered around a request from Jim Hacker's constituency to provide some support to the local football club, which could be funded by the closure and sale of a council art gallery. This was greeted with abject horror by Sir Humphrey, who made statments to the effect that subsidy was for arts, and not the the vulgar pastimes of the common people (i.e.football), and managed to thwart Hacker's plans (as usual). Truly, life imitating art!

With regard to Scottish folk music, the anglocentric Edinburgh elite treat their countrymen in this way, and are then suprised by the popularity of the SNP. It beggars belief.

Soldier Soldier will you marry me

I also heard that interview and I think you're being a bit selective. He also mentioned lottery contributions to athletic tracks and the Man chester velodrome. And where did you get the idea that only poor people buy lottery tickets?
As to folk music, in the 60/70s recent immigrants to this country denounced English folk music and songs as 'cultural" and irrelevant to them and therefore it was banned from all schools. If English culture and folk songs continue to be banned, it would be grossly unfair to expect us to subsidise Scots culture.

Will Jones

I know the National Lottery is often referred to as a "tax on idiots", but it isn't actually a tax. So National Lottery awards to the arts are not tax payer subsidies. Or am I missing something?

Burton

There are different middle classes. Only a few of the "chattering classes" go the opera, it's a very select crowd. Personally I have to go for work, a lot of the seats are bought for client entertainment (I work in banking). I hate it but there's no accounting for taste but feel bad that my firm is bidding up ticket prices and sends people who couldn't care less, to the exclusion of real opera cognoscenti.

Most real middle class people, in their semis in Norwich, Macclesfield or Guildford never attend the cinema, yet alone the ROH. But these are the people being squeezed hard by rising taxes, eroded pensions and failing public services.

mart

Fraser, I think you make a good case.

But can you please think again about the use of this new adjective-du-jour: "hard-pressed".

Presumably it's a euphemism for the working and/or middle classes. Or maybe in the case above you just wanted a term that would cover all those who do not go to the opera in London. Either way, I suppose I get the meaning. But would it be possible to find way of expressing the thought while avoiding that term please?

Keep up the good work! And welcome back.

davidc

the lottery 'working class money funding middle class activities'

TrevorH

As Will Jones says - the lottery is not a tax.

As for subsidies ... if we were taxed less and were as wealthy in reality as the years of alleged 'growth' ought to have made us, we would not need subsidies.

We need subsidies because years of an abysmally run economy leave the arts needing subsidy. Art has always needed sponsors. Tchaikovsky had Nadezhda von Meck as a sponsor. Beethoven had a number of patrons/sponsors.

We are as individuals too poor to properly support the arts because of the state which in turn is left to support the arts.

Al Lane

Buying a lottery ticket is not compulsory. I have no interest in sport, but am pleased that improved funding via the lottery is supporting those who are.

Chris SE9

The middle classes always get the best deals in every way. They benefit most from the public services because they can play the system and be pushy. And they avoid more tax. So it is no surprise that they get most from lottery funded events as well.

Fraser Nelson

Mart, by "hard pressed" I mean the families who have been pushed to the limits of their budget as a result of increases inflation and Brown's tax hikes. I mean to distinguish them from the better-off, for whom the credit crunch means buying fewer opera tickets.

Tanuki

Perhaps the "arts" community should use some of its subsidies to subsidise Amy Winehouse and Pete Docherty through rehab programs? That would actually be far more useful than spending money propping up the usual elitist arts (opera, theatre, museums and the like).

mckenzie

Its the law, once you make it into the 'middle-class', you have to do your utmost to shit on those below.
It sounds harsh, but that's the rules. Speaking of shit, opera is a complete mystery to my feckless, ignorant working class brain cell.

mart

Hi Fraser, fair enough; the explanation makes sense and I agree with the link you're making between policy and the worsening situations for real people.

I just wanted you to be aware (IMHO anyway) that when an article contains the phrase "hard-pressed families" it looks a little bit like a Labour press release.

(Or maybe a Conservative one, come to think of it!)

Chuck Unsworth

@ Chris SE9

Oh dear!

Evidence please?

And is tax avoidance illegal? Try Sainsbury's, for example - past masters at tax avoidance. Are the owners all 'middle class'?

Verity

Chris SE9 - Where does it say that the middle classes get the most from lottery funds? I must have missed that bit.

McKenzie - Funny, I feel the same way about the Olympics. I believe they are drowning in public money. Latest estimate nine billion pounds, is it?

Tanuki, I thought Amy Winehouse was basically permanently in a rehab programme? Are you saying her serial rehabs are funded by the taxpayer?

All that aside, I do not believe the arts should be subsidised in any way, except by private benefactors whose choice it is. If they can't make it on their own, that means they don't appeal to a sufficient number of ticket buyers. Maybe they should put on some popular performances, as the Americans do, and watch the money from ticket-holders come sluicing through.

McKenzie, as a class warrior, please make an original or funny observation about the middle classes. Malice needs a lighter touch to be engaging, I'm afraid.

Ian C

How about the Lottery subsidising my/our legal obligation to fund the BBC and its oh so very Low Art?

After all its must be the gullible and stupid who watch all that rancid populist guff produced on teh Beeb and surely they must be the same lot who are mug enough to pay for lottery tickets?

Fergus Pickering

mckenzie, the way you feel about opera I feel about football. What a silly game it is and so boring. Up and down and up and down goes the ball and then suddenly there's a goal, though God knows why. And the ridiculous gear they dress in, those daft shorts. God give me strength. Opera, on the other hand, is one of the glories of the human spirit. If you don't like it then TRY HARDER. Tut-tut

Anthony the Facilitator

It would seem to me that all opinions on this particular blog are (about) correct. I think it is the 'durr' brains that dish the money out that are the problem. I play in a four piece folk band with a brilliant scottish fiddler and a mandolin player par exellonce. But I do not think J Major meant any of this money to come to us. We are to busy bartering with tight fisted landlords to worry about money.

TGF UKIP

I am an opera lover (with a name like mine, how could I not be!) but I completely agree that opera should not be subsidized via either state or lottery and neither should be any other adult spectator art, entertainment or sport.

And Sideliner, I well remember that episode of "Yes Minister" with Sir Humphrey agitatedly looking at his watch and under pressure from Jim Hacker confessing that he was indeed "off to the opera." "Works outing then" said Jim. A priceless and exquisite summary.

Frank Pulley

" Dougie Maclean, one of Scotland’s more successful fiddlers"

Shouldn't that read "one of Scotland's numerous successful fiddlers"? :-)

Frank Pulley

Sorry - belay that last post I just read through the comments and see that someone beat me to it.

Mark

More interesting than 'should opera be subsidised' is perhaps why Royal Opera house is and Glyndebourne and Met are not. And still they can put on non-populist works (this summer includes Love & other demons, Hansel und Gretel, Albert Herring etc, Eugene Onegin, L'inc. Poppea).

My understanding is ROH has high costs due to bolshy unionised labour (stage hands, back office etc.) on above market wages, conditions and pensions. And from hiring high profile, big name and so expensive soloists.

The Arts quango is probably supportive of both, the big names to justify the continued subsidy. And so politicos can boast to their foreign counterparts about trophy productions.

So buyers of scratch cards and lottery tickets are feather bedding unionised labour and international divas. Much better any arts funding (which should be reduced) goes to the grass roots and professional arts and their management learn to live within their earnings. As do Glynde, Met, numerous galleries etc.

BCS

''But why have British taxpayers subsidise the singing of songs written a hundred years ago in Italian or German?''

This post, encapsulated in this awe-inspiringly cretinous sentence, is so crass, stupid and vulgar that it is almost obscene. It would make a column written by Arthur Scargill in the Sun newspaper seem civilised. Quite how the political editor of a hitherto distinguished conservative magazine can spout such hideous populism is beyond me.

salieri

BCS - two cheers, but I think Fraser may have been celebrating his return by being deliberately mischievous and provocative. At least I do hope so.

Richard

Mr. Hilton,

You say these aspects of our culture should be subsidised for each new generation... If each new generation wanted to watch them, they would pay their value to see them. They wouldn't need money by the proxy violence of the state to keep them running.

You say that only Big Brother or Deal or No Deal would be produced by the great companies. Not neccesarily so. If the great plays were worth the cost of producing, YOU and others who want to watch them would pay the true value of the ticket.

Put it this way. Say a RSC tickets costs £25, but that is with £10 of gov or lottery funding. Would you not pay £35 for that ticket? If yes, why the hell do you demand I subsidise your entertainment when you would pay it's full cost? And if not, why in hell should I pay for you to watch something your not prepared to pay for? If it's not worth you paying the full price for, who are you to expropriate my hard earned money to subsidise it??

No one should expect their special interest hobby to be subsidised by other people.