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Wednesday 8 February 2012

One cut they could make

Tuesday, 24th November 2009

Well of course there have to be cuts. Those famous ‘ordinary people’ know it perfectly well, as they also know how much public money has been not spent but wasted in the NuLab years Most discussions on the subject begin with the word ‘Quangos’ so let’s do it too. Let’s start the cuts by abolishing the Arts Council. What is their point? Of what use are they? What good do they do which could not be done by patrons and private agencies?

I have never understood why almost any of the arts should be publicly subsidised. Note the word ‘almost.’ There are a few honourable exceptions. Performing the great music of the world by large orchestras and especially when those orchestras tour the whole country, as they should, is extremely expensive and even if concert halls were filled to capacity every night, for them to do without subsidy would mean that ticket prices would have to be prohibitively expensive for all but the very richest. This cannot fairly be said about any of the other arts but music of this kind is an exception. Let the great orchestras be subsidised and have it as a condition of their receiving our money that they tour and also do educational work, take music into schools and prisons, reverse the decline in instrumental playing among the young. These subsidies could be simply and swiftly decided upon, for a minimum of five years at a time by one small committee of musical experts. It shouldn’t take more than a couple of meetings to distribute the lot, after which they can disband for five years. There is no need for professional Arts Officers and Regional Arts Officers, deputies and assistants and strategists and inspectors and all the rest to go through weeks and layers of meetings.

‘Ah but the ACE receives so little, it’s scarcely worth bothering to abolish them.’ Of course 520 million is little beside, say, the NHS budget but it is still 520 million and by both getting rid of the Arts Council and cutting 90% of public subsidy to the arts we would save a good deal more.

Some years ago, I overheard Prince Philip say to the Chairman of an excessively subsidised arts organisation – ‘If the place can’t pay its way shut it down.’ I couldn’t agree more. Public subsidy of, say, the theatre, makes all those who work in it self-indulgent and profligate because it is not their own money they are spending. If they had to cut their coat according to the cloth of ticket receipts, they would soon go back to painting cheap cotton to look like leather instead of making costumes out of leather itself and directors would have to put on plays and productions that people would want to see in large numbers. It would concentrate their minds wonderfully. The commercial theatre has to survive by putting bums on seats and contrary to leftist propaganda, it is not only schlock and musicals that manage to run and run.

There is absolutely no justification for using your tax money or mine to pay the small publishers of esoteric poetry or unreadable short stories to print books that sit in piles on warehouse shelves because nobody wants to buy them or to fork out for small arty magazines to which fifty people subscribe. There is none for subsidising ethnic minority street theatre, feminist rap, poets in pubs, political graffiti or any other so-called ‘Art’ in which only the participants and a few hangers-on are interested. The non-jobs in the Arts should all go too. Arts Advisers, Regional Arts Development Officers, Literature enablers, Political Correctness and Equal Rights in the arts enforcers.. get rid of them. Poets and writers in residence can go too, mainly because these jobs invariably go to those who cannot make a proper living by selling their work in the marketplace. People in prison, psychiatric and other hospitals and children in schools deserve to have the very best practitioners visit them and teach them, the best musicians, painters, writers, poets, not the fourth rate, which is what they generally get because those are the people who cling onto the public sector arts jobs. With the money saved on dozens of ACE careerists we might be able to afford to send the best out there – the world class concert pianists, the best actors in the greatest plays, to have the greatest writers and painters both show their work and encourage and teach. Why not the Hockneys and the Heaneys? How inspiring they would be to young people in inner cities and long-term prisoners. It is beyond patronising to assume they deserve only the fourth rate PC also-rans. The administration for all of this could also be run very simply on a low budget - as we all know, Parkinson’s law operates par excellence in public sector administrative circles. Huge amounts of both tax and national lottery money have been squandered on white-elephant buildings – Museums of this and Centres of that, which have either closed for lack of public interest or been left unfinished or unopened, which is scandalous. Not none of these could even be described as having much connection with what you and I would call the Arts.

There is already some generous, if often unpublicised private patronage of the arts. Individuals can do as they please with their own money and if there were slightly more generous tax breaks even more would sponsor whatever art they chose, in what way they liked. Patrons have always made the greatest difference – just look at the arts heritage in America.

We will not be able to afford many things for the next few years and luxuries and extras, like cake after bread and butter, will have to go. Public subsidy for the arts, let alone the cost of the pointless and useless Arts Council, must be cut. There will be a lot of voices raised from certain quarters of course –luvvies are very loud and self-righteous squealers. But I bet nobody else much would notice is the Arts Council wasn’t there any more.

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Beer Moth

November 24th, 2009 8:05pm Report this comment

Excellent call.

This and recent posts compel me to admit that you were right: I did make too early a judgment on you and your blog. I apologise unreservedly for my initial churlishness.

Bunnykins

November 24th, 2009 8:36pm Report this comment

Susan. from your mouth to G-d's ears! However, the jury's still out on whether or not prisoners rate a mention as being worthy of a visit from the likes of Hockney or Robert Cohen, given the long line of those eminently more deserving of their attentions.

Snowman

November 24th, 2009 8:43pm Report this comment

hear, hear

sadly, nobody will listen. Many of these sinecures based on patronage provide convenient outlets for the many hangers-on whom the party leaders do not want to antagonize, but have no use for. Others serve as useful vehicles for shifting responsibility away from the Parliament.

If Cameron were serious about a clean up of the quangoes, he would abolish all of them at a stroke saving around £70bn. If the services that any of these undemocratic set-ups provides were so indispensable, it should be brought within the relevant Department with a Minister in charge, or paid for by a levy by those it claims to be helping.

EC

November 25th, 2009 9:14am Report this comment

Well said! The arts be self financing, financed by private sponsorship or genuine public subscription.

Left to their own devices and with a pot of someone else's money to squander, the politicos and the farties will come up with something like The Loughborough Sock Man or far far worse .....

James Delingpole

November 25th, 2009 10:07am Report this comment

I agree Susan. Not least because we know that no form of state arts subsidy is ever going to reach people like us because we are guilty of incorrect thinking.

Fergus Pickering

November 25th, 2009 11:10am Report this comment

Everybody says this, and so do I, until it comes to their own particular neck of the woods. With you, Susan, it's big orchestras. With other people it's opera. Let me say a word for the poetry magazines. Firstly they do really only need peanuts to keep themselves going. One orchestra subsidy could probably cover the lot of them. Secondly, you'd be surprised how many people of about your age I would guess, (and mine)n write poetry, go to creative writing classes - or used to until this g demented government cut them in favour of more classes for the young illiterate - and submit their, often jolly good poems to the magazines, run by editors without payment. There's an excellent one down in Devon called Acumen, but they're dotted here, there and everywhere. Do you like poetry at all? Do you like the poems of the late U.A. Fanthorpe. She was published mostly by the Peterloo Press, now alas bust, which received subsidies, not very big ones, from the Arts Council. Peterloo's poets are mostly traditional, mostly quite old, wehe kind of stuff I guess you would like. Google them and see. The present poet laureate who is also jolly good I think, was published most of her writing life through subsidy. And these are TINY subsidies, not the stonking great ones you musical bods want.

THX1138

November 25th, 2009 12:02pm Report this comment

So basically it boils down to keeping the stuff you like. We should increase arts funding it brings joy to the nation. And if CH readers never get their fat arses of their DFS sofa's to enjoy the art and culture of the nation well that's their own stupid fault... Why spoil it for the rest of us that do?

w woman

November 25th, 2009 12:43pm Report this comment

If the place cant pay its way close it down said Prince Phillip I hope as a republican Susan you said something about glasshouses and stones.

Peter From Maidstone

November 25th, 2009 3:06pm Report this comment

w woman, are you suggesting her majesty doesn't pay her way? Do you work as hard as her? Have you started any national organisations to help young people? Have you started any national organisations to help young entrepreneurs? To encourage adventure and self-reliance? Her Majesty, Prince Philip and Prince Charles more than earn their worth - which cannot be measured in simply utilitarian scales in any case. I am sure Princess Anne also earns her keep.

Paul B

November 25th, 2009 3:38pm Report this comment

Have to agree with THX and others Susan.You rather lose your argument when you advocate subsidy for large orchestras. Many bands are large, not just classical orchestras. Jools Holland has a very large band, should he be subsidised? What you have advocated, if I can say so in the politest terms, is just another form of nimbyism.

EC

November 25th, 2009 4:41pm Report this comment

THX1138, Mr Numberplate!

Some sobering statistics for you to ponder whilst you're in the Notting Hill gym with Dave, pounding the treadmill, admiring your trim figure in the mirror...

Google 'THX1138' and the max hits returned are only 123,000 and they are not all yours!
Google "George Laird" however, and he gets 340,000!

So, on a 1st past the blog post basis, George, a true artist, is far more worthy of arts council funding than you are!

It might seem cruel but that's democracy. Have you tried the GLC?

Beer Moth

November 25th, 2009 6:27pm Report this comment

THX

Well no it doesn't just boil down to keeping what you or anyone else likes. It boils down to what a desperately struggling nation can afford.

If you earn enough to be able to attend the theatre, opera etc then I'm right pleased for you. But I'm really not keen on my tax money helping to fund the pursuits of those who should be able to fend for themselves.

THX1138

November 25th, 2009 9:14pm Report this comment

Beer Moth - Well we need something to cheer us in these dark days then don't we? Personally I find that a bit of "feminist rap" does wonders in taking my mind off the deficit.

On a more serious note the creative arts is a big income earner for UK plc and many of our leading talents like Stephen Daldry , Roger Michell , Sam Mendes, Trevor Nunn and lots and lots of others got their first break and learned their trade in the subsidised theatre... Tonight at The National you could be watching fantastic new plays by Alan Bennett and Terry Pratchett, surely money better spent than keeping a bunch of skivers on incapacity benefit in some grim northern town.

THX1138

November 25th, 2009 10:42pm Report this comment

Dear EC

I miss good old George.

THX 1138
The Campaign for More Gratuitous Archers References on Blogs

Hysteria

November 26th, 2009 2:05am Report this comment

yeh - what happened to George? (been away doing real work for a few weeks)

to the wider point of the blog. Desperate times call for desperat emeasures.

A first step for me is one to one matching of tax reduction based on charitable giving.

Nicholas J. Rogers

November 26th, 2009 8:16am Report this comment

Excellent post. I agree completely. I just hope that the Conservatives have the courage - and the mandate - to make changes like this.

John Edwards

November 26th, 2009 7:57pm Report this comment

So now that you've proposed how to make cuts in NHS management layers and the Arts bureaucracy perhaps you could take a look at trimming expenditure on the military.

According to the latest available figures announced in the Commons by armed forces minister Bill Rammell: the army has 90 more generals, lieutenant generals, major generals, brigadiers and colonels than required for effective duties. The Royal Navy has 80 admirals, vice admirals, rear admirals and commodores identified as "surplus to requirements". Meanwhile the Royal Air Force has 160 air marshals, air vice marshals, air commodores and group captains mainly behind desks.

Surely you can suggest some economies while protecting frontline activities?

Herbert Thornton

December 13th, 2009 1:32am Report this comment

Since this discussion has expanded to include not just the "Arts" but the NHS, the Queen and the top-heavy Military establishment, may I throw the BBC into the pot too?

Since WW2, the BBC has moved further and further away from impartiality. Indeed it has become a super-Quango, operating against the National Interest.

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