At the start of 2013, I unexpectedly found myself thrust to the forefront of the arts funding debate. In Battalions, my independent report about the ways in which government cuts to Arts Council England were affecting the development of new work for the stage, gathered some momentum on social media and started being picked up by the mainstream press.
The data uncovered by my research showed theatres across the country drastically curtailing new play development and also outreach such as schools workshops, youth theatres and free script reading. Regional theatres, small-scale touring and theatre for young people were being disproportionately affected – and philanthropy was not filling the gap.
In Battalions had some modest success in moving these issues up the political agenda, but research-based lobbying isn’t the only approach.
What Next? is a movement bringing together arts and cultural organisations from across the UK to articulate and strengthen the role of culture in our society through weekly meetings and behind-the-scenes lobbying. The initiative was the brainchild of Young Vic artistic director David Lan and creative director of the Royal Opera House Deborah Bull. What Next? meetings have always been well attended by politicians. The movement’s masterstroke was to create a politically neutral space in which politicians from all parties could engage with the UK’s professional culture-makers without feeling that they would be attacked. There’s a time and a place for anger, but it’s rarely helpful as an opening gambit. I’d wager that few politicians enter parliament intent on decimating the UK’s arts and culture. The most effective lobbying is a dialogue rather than a rant.
But is it time to get more politicised? In Battalions has teamed up with Improbable Theatre’s long-running Devoted and Disgruntled series to hold an Open Space event at which the industry can get together to debate this all day on 17 June. We’re lucky to have the support of the MA in dramatic writing at Drama Centre London at Central Saint Martins.
I’d argue British theatre has for five years responded rather reasonably to the sustained attack on our sector, diligently trotting out economic impact studies, infographics and advocacy campaigns. Government responses such as tax breaks are of course welcome, but they are ideological – rewarding end-result economic activity rather than stimulating the new by underwriting risk. As such, they inevitably benefit large commercial players far more than grassroots organisations, where the next generation of artists and audiences will be nurtured. Tax breaks are symptomatic of a “free market fundamentalism”, which is blind to any form of value other than profit.
In the early days of In Battalions, I was warned off having “the ideological conversation” by a senior theatre industry insider. “Leave that to the Labour front bench,” he advised. Keep it about the research-based evidence. Say anything else and your campaign can be written off as “politically motivated”. But isn’t that what government cuts are – going after the poor and the public sector while refusing to regulate the banks which demonstrably caused the 2008 crash and subsequent recession?
Numerous reports have done more than enough to prove the worth of UK culture over the past five years, which repays its investment many times over, economically and otherwise. And, in terms of cutting the tiny arts budget to reduce the deficit, forget it – you may as well cut your hair to lose weight.
Yet all the talk is of more cuts, with the DCMS budget axed by another £30m only last week and the sector braced for more cuts in the 2015 autumn statement. If the economy is supposedly improving, why isn’t state investment in our sector?
Perhaps it isn’t about the evidence at all. Perhaps it’s time to shift the debate from micro to macro, focusing less on the minutiae of economic arguments and more on the real issue – a profound difference of values. This goes far beyond arts funding. It is an increasingly bitter fault line running down the centre of our society, pitting public against private, the intrinsic against the instrumental, the economic against the human.
With a Tory majority government, we need to start talking about this. Let’s have a good-faith debate about what’s really at stake here – the role of the state in 21st-century society.
If the worst is yet to come, we urgently need to get our government around a table to discuss the values system that is motivating their cuts, rather than the cuts themselves.
