As the Conservatives clutch at political straws, the Labour party is readying itself for government. Some predict a general election as early as next spring. In Thangam Debbonaire – who started out as a professional cellist – there is the unusual prospect of a culture secretary who understands the arts from deep personal experience. Two months into her job shadowing the unimpressive incumbent, Lucy Frazer, she is in listening mode. The next step is to get herself a serious, ambitious plan for power.
As Labour culture secretary, she would almost certainly score easy points by just not being Tory. That means, to pick some random examples, by not being among the 12 Tories to hold the post in 13 years. By displaying less ignorance about the brief (Nadine Dorries’s startling misapprehension, when culture secretary, that Channel 4 is publicly funded, stands out amid a strong field). By not relentlessly starving, punishing and criticising the BBC, the UK’s largest cultural organisation. By not dragging the arts into a cynical, divisive culture war. By not being part of a government that unleashes something as self-harming as an exit from the European Union. By not engaging in a zero-sum game in which London is pitted against the rest of the country in the name of levelling up.
But Labour needs to set its sights much higher than avoiding the Tories’ egregious failings. It needs to cherish and grow the arts again. And it needs to do so with purpose, optimism and pride.
The scale of the challenge is vast. The Tory destruction began in 2010, as soon as the coalition came to power, with George Osborne’s austerity cuts. The then culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, removed an instant £19m from Arts Council England’s budget, while the overall budget of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport was reduced by 24% between 2010 and 2014-15, pulling it down from £1.4bn to £1.1bn. These seem tiny figures because they are: utterly inconsequential when set against Osborne’s total cuts, irrelevant when compared with overall government finances. Still, they were enormous enough when applied to individual arts organisations.
Now, after 13 years, grant-in-aid and lottery funding for the arts in England have undergone a real-terms cut of £178m. But of course cuts to the arts have never been about the money. They have been ideological. The Tories wanted a smaller state, objected to market interventions, strongly favoured science and technology at the expense of the arts and humanities, and, particularly during the later years of culture-war obsessed Tory rule, made no secret of their loathing of what they saw as a centre-left dominance in institutions from universities to heritage organisations.
These basic deprivations have been vastly compounded over the same period. Local authority support has drained away from civic museums and local theatres as councils’ income has plummeted and costs for statutory obligations, such as social care, have soared. School budgets have been starved: the Tories have been content to deny children from poorer backgrounds the soul-enlarging delights they make sure to provide for their own offspring, such as learning musical instruments, extracurricular theatre and visits to museums. The appalling blow of Brexit hit everyone and everything from touring musicians to international art loans and film production.
It was then that Covid-19 brought the cultural sector near to collapse. Along with the hospitality industry, it was among the worst hit parts of the economy. Though the Tories did bring forward a package to prevent the immediate, widespread bankruptcy of cultural institutions, there has been no serious attempt to put the arts world back on a sustainable footing. Inflation and the cost of living crisis have been deeply damaging. Now, instead of the much-vaunted “headroom” in the economy being used to help fix basic public services, including the arts, Jeremy Hunt, in his autumn statement, has declined to lift departmental spending in favour of sprinkling pre-election sweeteners to the Tory base.
The cultural sector is now immeasurably weakened compared with the pre-2010 years. Experts in preserving a good shopfront, our museums, theatres, orchestras and galleries have done their best to conceal the rot from the casual visitor. But they are damaged; they are shabbier, smaller, more timid than they used to be. They are taking fewer risks – of the sort that led to brilliant but unpredictable long-running theatre hits such as War Horse or Matilda. The Covid years in particular mean that fewer children are being exposed to theatre or music or dance or art: those things that can spark a child’s imagination, show her something curious and strange, deepen her understanding and empathy, shift the course of her life.
For those who work in the arts, whether as employees or as freelance artists, the situation is precarious. In the NHS in recent years, the Tories have made the service almost impossible for healthcare workers to thrive in or even survive in. The same is true for the arts. Earlier this year, in the wake of an exodus of artistic directors from theatres, the boss of Battersea Arts Centre enumerated 33 reasons why working in the arts was so difficult at the moment – from weak boards to a combative social media environment. But in the end, much circled back to underinvestment. Shrinking arts organisations and the underpaid, fatigued people who work in them are struggling to create the long-term conditions for the things they went into their job to achieve: to enable the creation of great art. To make our towns and cities places worth living in. To allow people from all parts of society contact with art’s life-changing possibilities.
An incoming Labour government will be failing the country unless it steps up to the challenge of fixing this situation. It will not be difficult to do in one sense: comparatively small amounts of investment make vast differences. But it must be done in the full, confident sense that doing so is not an optional, frivolous add-on to the real job of governing. A healthy, fully functioning cultural infrastructure is a sign of a healthy, fully functioning society. The Arts Council, founded in 1946, should be spoken about in the same breath as the NHS, founded in 1948. Both belong to Labour’s postwar conviction that good things ought to be available to everyone, regardless of their income.
Investing in the arts also happens to be a sound economic investment, in which relatively small amounts have excellent returns, entirely in line with the shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves’s ambition to pursue economic growth. It is a means of restoring local pride and reinvigorating town centres, of attracting tourists and delivering soft power.
But it means so much more than that. It is about giving people back public space – space in which they can exit their digital echo chambers and together confront unfamiliar, difficult ideas. It is about offering people ideas beyond their immediate experience – ideas that can bring delight, hope and joy, but also spark individuals’ ambitions, or suggest possibilities beyond their immediate horizon. It is about offering people the chance to live with dignity, to be better citizens who treat each other with decency and understanding. It is the stuff of being fully human. Debbonaire, Reeves and Keir Starmer need to think big. And they need to do it now.
Charlotte Higgins is the Guardian’s chief culture writer
