From the start, the combatively worded motion — ‘Time for the arts to stand on its own two feet and stop sponging off the tax-payer’ — came under attack in the Spectator arts debate at Church House last month.
From the start, the combatively worded motion — ‘Time for the arts to stand on its own two feet and stop sponging off the tax-payer’ — came under attack in the Spectator arts debate at Church House last month. Speaking for the motion were Nigel Farage MEP, Tiffany Jenkins and Marc Sidwell; against were Ben Bradshaw MP, Matthew Taylor and the Culture Secretary Ed Vaizey, who called it ‘brutal, vulgar, left-wing, and hostile to excellence and quality’. The arts doesn’t sponge off the taxpayer, he said, it’s the other way around. The subsidy supports the burgeoning tourism market. He revealed that the independent arts sector welcomes state-funded art and regards it as a research and development department. He defended free entrance to museums: ‘Imagine a Peruvian visitor who comes to the British Museum to see some of his national treasures. He reaches the café, with an extra £20 in his pocket because he got in for nothing, and he spends it on carrot cake and lapsang souchong. This is how it works. We fleece him at the café, not at the entrance.’
Nigel Farage celebrated the wording of the motion. ‘Clear, robust and unequivocal, it looks like a Ukip amendment in the European Parliament.’ He told us government rarely does things better than people. And he diagnosed the Arts Council with a disease that afflicts all public bodies. ‘It does its best to grow.’ The only beneficiaries of subsidised art were the administrators while the ‘poor ordinary taxpayers’ were forced to buy subsidised fun for the rich. Likening the Arts Council to British Leyland and the Common Agricultural Policy, he argued that a steady stream of government money ‘stops people thinking, stops them innovating’. He ended by begging Mr Cameron to abolish Ed Vaizey’s department altogether.
Tiffany Jenkins, of the Institute of Ideas, declared herself a convert — ‘with a heavy heart but a growing conviction’ — to the abolitionist cause. Too little merit, too little aesthetic judgment in subsidised arts’ projects dismayed her. She accused New Labour of ruthlessly politicising the arts. She concluded that state-funded art was being asked to find solutions where politics had failed. With sensationally vicious rhetoric she attacked subsidised art as ‘a lazy, evasive and undiscerning sector’, led by ‘a defensive, overpaid gaggle of administrators who waste our money on their bad art’.
Tony Blair’s former chief policy adviser and now head of the RSA, Matthew Taylor, found himself in agreement with Jenkins. He told us his aesthetic interests were entirely philistine: thrillers and football. But he saw that the arts had the potential to improve individuals and build a sense of identity in a community. A recent speech by the PM had convinced him that ‘citizenship is the key to the success of the UK’.
Marc Sidwell, business features editor of City AM, insisted that cutting funding didn’t mean cutting the arts altogether. He rattled off a list of artistic success stories that receive no subsidy: Glyndebourne, Shakespeare’s Globe…He quoted Stalin: ‘Artists are the engineers of mens’ souls,’ and asked if we really want the state to take on the delicate work of ‘defining ourselves’. Government should concentrate on protecting the liberties that are vital to a vibrant artistic culture. ‘Funding has failed. We know this because we’ve still got it.’
Former culture secretary Ben Bradshaw claimed to be offended by the motion’s ‘deeply pejorative’ wording. It neglected the truth that dependence on private sponsorship would jeopardise the arts. He reminded us of the ‘great public good’ provided by free access to the national collections. State support represents just 0.3 per cent of GDP and yet this modest allowance has made Britain’s arts sector, as a proportion of GDP, the largest in the world.
Before the debate, many in the room opposed the motion. Afterwards, plenty more had joined them. The motion was defeated.
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