Jude Kelly at the Royal Festival Hall. Photograph: Dan Chung
It's great to see the front page story in the Guardian this morning headlined Arts leaders turn on Jowell over Olympics. It's welcome because, until now, there has been a singular lack of arts leadership over the issue of the government's further £675m diversion of National Lottery funds to support the Olympics on top of the £410m already allocated.
Taken together with the recent cut of £39m from Grants for the Arts, as well as fears that the upcoming Comprehensive Spending Review will fail to deliver a settlement even in line with inflation, the outlook for the arts is bleak. It is time for leading arts figures to show some leadership, not just by speaking out but by taking an active role in the campaign to ensure that the arts do not suffer for years for the sake of a couple of weeks of jollies in the summer of 2012.
Jowell looks increasingly likely to go down in history as the arts minister who destroyed the arts, and her protestations that she is only borrowing the money is an IOU with little value. Given the current spiralling costs and the government's inability to get its sums right, how can she be sure the Olympics will turn a profit and the money will be returned? What's more, in the intervening years an entire generation of artists and producers will be lost forever because they will have been unable to get funding at crucial early points in their careers.
What we need is not just words but also action from people like Jude Kelly, who is not only artistic director of the South Bank Centre but also London 2012's chair of culture and education. Kelly has said: "We have had no say in how these cuts have been made and I am very sympathetic to colleagues who are anxious." This murmur of sympathy is welcome, but it is not enough. London won the Olympics not just on the back of its promise to deliver regeneration but also because the IOC was impressed by its ability to deliver a cultural programme alongside the sporting events. The ability to do that is now increasingly threatened, and Kelly must come out fighting.
Last week, during the Spill symposium at Soho Theatre, theatre-maker Marisa Carnesky, talking about her Carnesky's Ghost Train project, showed a short video from the TV programme London Tonight. It featured Kelly in her 2012 role sitting on one of the carriages and saying that this was exactly the kind of project that London 2012 needed. The recent slash in Grants for the Arts means it is unlikely that such a project would ever happen. It is independent artists such as Carnesky, as well as small companies and organisations, who will be hardest hit by the diversion of lottery funds.
I have enormous admiration for Kelly and so do many in the theatre world, but the audience of theatre practitioners watching that clip hooted with derision. It is up to her to prove their cynicism wrong and show that she is with the arts and not against them, and that the Olympics really can deliver the cultural opportunities that Jowell is claiming. If Kelly doesn't think they can, or will, then she should say so.
