A spot of apparently good news in terms of local authority arts cuts: a High Court judge has ruled that London Councils - the capital's umbrella group - acted unlawfully when it announced a huge raft of cuts that would have meant arts groups losing about £3m.
The cuts would have meant, for example, Theatre Royal Stratford East losing £80,000 which it uses in its core programme. Others affected included Barnet's artsdepot and the companies Tamasha and Clean Break.
Lyn Gardner writes about it here.
• Meanwhile anger at impending library closures continues with this Saturday being the main protest day. Philip Pullman has been confirmed as taking part in a read-in at his local library, Botley in Oxfordshire, from 11am which is a good excuse for anyone who hasn't read his 'internet sensation' libraries speech to read now. It also appeared in the Guardian in an edited form here.
Remember we'll be covering the protests on the day so please get in touch to tell us what you're planning and where. We've published a map with details of the protests we know about, but let us know if there's a protest near you that we haven't spotted. You can tell us in the comments below, via @culture_cuts on Twitter or by emailing culturecuts@gmail.com.
• There are some interesting annual stats brought together by Arts & Business worth looking at here. Its analysis shows that investment in the arts by business fell last year by 11% and private philanthropy fell by 3%. It sounds bad, but it could have been worse is the overall conclusion. What depressed but didn't surprise me was the startling regional variations. So out of £657m of private investment, London got £448.1m while the north east, where I was born and grew up, got £13.9m.
• And tomorrow afternoon there will be what promises to be an interesting debate in the Lords, initiated by the crossbench peer Nick Clancarty, himself an artist, in which he will argue that public funding of the arts is the key to artistic innovation.
Other speakers will be Joan Bakewell giving her maiden speech, Floella Benjamin, Melvyn Bragg, David Puttnam and Andrew Lloyd-Webber. It's got a 3 hour time slot and I'll aim to have some of the highlights on the blog tomorrow (or Friday by the very latest).
