WEB EXCLUSIVE: Review of Spectator arts funding debate

‘Time for the arts to stand on its own two feet and stop sponging off the taxpayer’

From the start, the combatively worded motion came under attack. Culture secretary Ed Vaizey called it ‘brutal, vulgar, left-wing, and hostile to excellence and quality.’ He urged us not to think of the arts as a layabout teenager watching Neighbours and eating cold pizza all day. 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 stated-funded art and regards it as a research and development department. He defended free entrance to museums with this economic parable. ‘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 lapsan souchong. This is how it works. We fleece him at the café, not at the entrance.’
 
MEP 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.