A bailout for the arts is good – but reopening would have been better

The government’s £1.57 billion lifeline for the cultural sector was bigger than most practitioners were expecting — and drew a chorus of approval from arts panjandrums lined up to offer quotes on the end of the DCMS press release. A nifty media exercise, then, and a smart deployment of the Hank Paulson ‘big number’: when the US treasury secretary unveiled his $700 billion bailout package in 2008, a staffer admitted the number had been pulled out of the air simply because it sounded huge. So it is with this deal, within which the real sum available for grants to be spread across a large number of threatened theatres and other venues is £880 million — and if it has to pass through the cobwebbed corridors of Arts Council England, you may be sure the process will be slow and leave many disappointed.

How much better to have said: ‘Barring a serious second spike, you’ll all be able to re-open for audiences with minimal social distancing well ahead of panto season — because we’ve got this epidemic under control and we’re proceeding on a basis of calculated risk, transparently explained.’ But of course no minister could utter the second half of that sentence, so the arts community, so vital to Britain’s image in the world, will just have to be grateful for payouts that defer, for now, the prospect of extinction.

The dividend divide

Against Hollow Firms is an oddly titled paper by Sheffield academics who believe major companies went into the pandemic weaker than they should have been because they had over-rewarded investors in the preceding period. It’s a thesis that throws light on current debate about whether the true ‘purpose’ of a company should be to serve shareholders or society at large — of which we hear daily echoes in criticism (by Green MP Caroline Lucas on Any Questions? for example) of firms that are still paying dividends, whether or not they took advantage of the Chancellor’s support schemes.