On his continuing perambulation towards the exit door, Tony Blair paused to give a 20-minute aside on the arts, at Tate Modern yesterday. Or rather a 20-minute aside on what a great time the arts have had under New Labour. "A golden age," declared Tony triumphantly, speaking of his "great pride" in the arts in his longest speech about the subject in 10 years in office. Twenty whole minutes in 10 long years! That strikes me as a mere afterthought rather than the actions of a man who really cares about the arts.
Call me ungrateful and cynical, but I think this speech was a sound bite and photo-opportunity for a man who knows that New Labour has lost the support and the confidence of Britain's artistic community and hoped he might win a few of us back before he leaves the building.
Certainly there's no arguing with Tony's figures - government funding for culture has doubled since 1997 - but that was after years of chronic under-funding by the previous Tory administration. The government likes to talk of funding, but we need to remember the money it gives to the arts is an investment on which the government gets a very good return. Investment in the arts has a significant return for the Exchequer ... it gets back more than it puts in. The Department of Culture, Media and Sport's own figures confirm that the arts sector accounts for more than 7% of the UK's GDP, creates 4% of export income and employs two million people.
In the circumstances you would have thought that Blair's administration could have invested a great deal more, but this has not been a government of joined-up thinking. Blair may be proud of his record on the arts but it is a record that looks tarnished the more you look at the detail.
As with previous governments it has been a case of giving with one hand and taking away with another. The freeze on funding announced in late 2004 means that after a remission in health, the arts have lately caught a bad cold, a condition that could turn to pneumonia and prove life threatening if this autumn's comprehensive spending review announces further cuts.
No wonder the arts community is jittery - particularly when the Arts Council is telling them to expect the worst and hinting ominously that there will not be equal misery for all. If Blair really wanted to be remembered as a friend of the arts, he would have used this speech to promise that the Treasury would dispatch an army of civil servants to feel down the back of its sofas and come up with the loose change necessary to ensure the long-term health of the arts in Britain. That promise was not been forthcoming.
Instead there was a vague statement about the government's pride in the arts, the kind of wishy-washy, mildly rousing speech that is normally dished out with the cups at annual school prize giving. Only in this case Tony seemed to be giving the prizes to himself. "A nation that cares about the arts will not just be a better nation. In the early 21st century it will be a more successful one and a more cohesive one," he opined.
Fine words are easy, but this is a government that has shown how much it cares about the arts by creating a culture of testing in our schools and an obsession with league tables that is so all consuming that music, drama and arts have been squeezed out of timetables and theatre visits stopped unless they can demonstrate that they are linked to the National Curriculum. Is denying our children everyday access to the arts the actions of a government that values the arts?
In fact it has become increasingly clear, particularly since the arts community and the Blair government fell out over Iraq, that Labour doesn't value the arts in themselves but only as a tool to deliver the governments social policies. It is no surprise that Blair spoke proudly in his speech of the role the arts play in regeneration, and pretty chilling that he said nothing at all about the enrichment of the imagination, their transcending power and the sheer pleasure that they bring to millions of people.
Perhaps the most insidious effect of the last 10 years is the way that we have failed to notice that New Labour has chipped away at the arms length principle on which the Arts Council was set up to the point that ACE now looks like a state agency that speaks the same language and has the same priorities as the government.
Blair's speech is clearly just another bit of legacy positioning spiel, but it would be foolish to think that a Tory government under David Cameron would be any different or more sympathetic to the arts. After all the only interest that Cameron's Tories have shown in the arts thus far has been to hold a debate entitled: "Why should any government bother with the arts?"
