English National Opera's Gaddafi, in collaboration with Asian Dub Foundation: a politically expedient idea. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
In general the world of classical music has been as impervious to Blair as Blair has been to serious music. His egregious brand of populism has found little space for the arts in general, and none at all for arts that are too conveniently branded elitist; concerts and opera have had to fight against the accusation of elitism for far longer than just the years of New Labour, so could never have expected any kind of special patronage.
On the occasions when that pressure to be popular has been felt in music, the effects have been entirely negative. The whole concept of cross-over masquerading as a kind of politically correct accessibility has too often produced work aimed at the lowest common denominator, or led organisations that should have been maintaining far higher standards into serious lapses of artistic judgement. Would English National Opera have commissioned a work like the benighted Gaddafi had not the woolly notion of opening up opera to the untapped younger audience seemed such a politically expedient idea to embrace? And would the Proms before the Blair years ever have dreamt of including an evening with Michael Ball in its season? Those are the negatives, driven by the wholly false idea that popular art must by definition be good art, and one that the Arts Council and its subsidiaries, to their lasting shame, have not done remotely enough to contradict.
And while the last decade has seen the opening of a number of important new venues for music in Britain - Gateshead's Sage and Cardiff's Millennium Centre are the highest profile examples - all were projects planned long before the false dawn of 1997. What has been increasingly important in priming capital projects in the arts since then has been funding from the lottery: like it or loathe it, there are a number of places for listening to music or seeing opera that simply would not exist without the lottery fund providing a significant amount of the financing. Whether or not in the years leading up to the 2012 Olympics there will be enough state support for the companies and orchestras that perform in those venues to survive is another matter altogether.
