After years of cuts, underfunding and the Brexit effect the arts and creative industries were hoping Labour would usher real change. Not so reports Julie Ward
I have worked in the Creative and Cultural Industries (CCIs) almost my entire adult life and I can say without contradiction that life in the arts has never been easy. Despite the global reputation of British culture, spearheaded by enduring brands such as Shakespeare and the Beatles, successive governments of all colours have never matched public investment in the arts at a level commensurate with our European neighbours. The best years were largely before my time, for example, when Jennie Lee was Arts Minister in Wilson’s government. Lee renewed the Arts Council of Great Britain’s charter, enabling an expansion of its work in the regions as well as the flowering of London’s South Bank Centre. She introduced the only UK White Paper for the Arts to be published for the next half-century, the absence of which subsequently ceded ground to the Tories. Labour, it should be remembered, is a natural home for the arts, as articulated by William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement.
The Arts Council has been through numerous iterations since its founding in 1946, eventually separating into distinct bodies for each of the nations. Sadly, Arts Council England (ACE) mutated into a toothless organisation, mandated to distribute meagre public funds, at the mercy of capricious Tory masters including Nadine Dorries and other prominent Brexiteers, none of whom acknowledged the serious damage to the CCIs from our split with the EU. Meanwhile the creeping hand of censorship attempted to muzzle much of the sector, with ACE sending beneficiaries letters early in 2024 warning them about being overtly political. This was clearly a government-orchestrated diktat in response to the plethora of creatives who were demonstrating solidarity with Palestinian artists. Scared of enraging various Tory supremos, both ACE and the BBC no longer seemed capable of standing up for freedom of artistic expression. In this respect, the appointment of Lisa Nandy as Labour’s Secretary of State for DCMS has already sent positive smoke signals, offering a welcome truce.
The decades since Lee haven’t all been bad. There was a brief respite during the Blair and Brown years with free access to museums, cheaper theatre tickets and the Creative Partnerships’ arts in education programme. The National Lottery helped to plug some gaps, and thanks to vocal advocates, such as former Northern Arts supremo Peter Stark, there was a rebalancing of limited largesse away from London and in favour of the regions, especially northwards where the poorest people purchased the highest number of lottery tickets. Meanwhile, Tessa Jowell’s success in bringing the Olympics to London, paving the way for Danny Boyle’s inspired opening ceremony, resulted in a brief feel-good factor that transcended long-held rivalries between arts and sport. (It was later revealed that Jeremy Hunt, who took over the culture brief in 2010, had tried to veto Boyle’s sequence about the NHS.)
The CCIs came under sustained attack from the very beginning of the Tory LibDem 2010 coalition. It wasn’t just central government cuts to bodies such as ACE which precipitated the demise of hundreds of arts organisations across the country, austerity measures forced local councils to make hard choices between statutory responsibilities and the seemingly more frothy arts, libraries and museums sector. However, this existential threat did prompt creatives to get their proverbial act together resulting in the What Next movement which continues to this day, providing a platform for sector-led advocacy. In Newcastle a threatened 100% cut to the arts was reduced to a mere 50% cut as a result of lobbying by the local What Next chapter.
Fast forward 14 years and despite a welcome change of government I can only report a modicum of satisfaction from the arts community who had high hopes that Rachel Reeves’ first budget would deliver some relief in the form of much-needed real investment in the sector. A vigorous cross-sectoral initiative, Campaign for the Arts, had laid out modest demands prior to the General Election in the hope of bigger crumbs from the Treasury table. However, Reeves’ October announcement offered little in real terms with a 2.5% cut in day to day DCMS spending when compared with other departments. This news was cleverly buried by the announcement of flagship projects such as £25m for the Crown Works Studios in Sunderland which promises 8000 jobs in the region, many in the construction industry. Whilst this initiative is welcome is does little to fix the fundamental country-wide crisis caused by decades of cuts, underfunding and the Brexit effect.
Post-election, Campaign for the Arts published “The State of the Arts”, a shocking report jointly authored with the University of Warwick, which clearly lays out in statistics, graphs and bar charts the terrible damage inflicted on the sector under the Tories. In a documentary, broadcast by Sky Arts on July 24, Lord Melvyn Bragg and a host of other notables including artists Tracey Emin and Antony Gormley, the actors Maxine Peake and Lenny Henry, the poet Lemn Sissay, the filmmaker and comedian Armando Iannucci, and the musician Sheku Kanneh-Mason, made a passionate case for why the arts matter, referring to the report and urging the new government to change course and defend the sector.
Meanwhile, the TUC’s Creative Industries and Leisure Committee (CILC) has been leading a long campaign demanding fair renumeration via copyright reform and a better deal for freelancers (who were unrecognised by Sunak’s Covid measures). Disappointingly, calls for Universal Basic Income for artists and creatives (as per the current model being trialled in Eire) continue to be ignored. And now the growing existential threat of AI to primary creators is exercising CILC and others who urgently want legislation to constrain big tech. In this area we are way behind the EU whose AI Act entered into force on August 1st.
There remain some faint hopes that the Starmer government might at least take notice of their own think-tanks. A substantial Fabian pamphlet, “Arts For Us All”, published in September 2024, makes a strong case for “putting culture and creativity at the heart of national renewal” with a call for a full funding review, the embedding of arts in the National Curriculum (supported by the NEU and UCU), the creation of a talent pipeline for the CCIs, and proposals for the expansion of library services and wider access to museum collections. The document also makes a clear case for the UK to rejoin the Creative Europe programme and alleviate the problems caused to our touring artists by Brexit.
However, at successive recent Labour Party conferences in Liverpool, a city rescued by huge amounts of EU funding following the Tory policy of “managed decline”, Brexit has remained the elephant in the room. Membership of the EU had significantly propped up our ailing creative sector with programmes such as ERDF, ESF, Creative Europe and the flagship European Capitals of Culture which did so much to revitalise both Liverpool and Glasgow. Ironically, the UK was next in turn to hold the coveted 2023 ECOC title when Brexit scuppered the chances of Leeds, Dundee, Belfast and Derry.
The Tories’ supposed replacement of EU funding, the UK Shared Prosperity Fund, has not come close to the level of investment lost as a result of Tory hard Brexit. If the Labour mantra of “economic growth” is going to mean anything to our CCIs Starmer’s much vaunted EU relationship reset is going to need more than a few touring visas along with a film studio in Sunderland.