First cut is the deepest?

The c word is now being spoken out loud on all sides of the political spectrum. There are good cuts and bad cuts, it seems, but the focus is all on cuts in spending. Joe Hallgarten on his arm’s length state blog makes the point that politicians needs to be talk more honestly about the limitations of their power over the world, and thus encourage in us, the ‘public’, a more realistic and probably more forgiving attitude. (He kind of praises Arts Council with one hand, for at least grappling with change, and then digs us in the ribs with the other, which is probably fair enough.) Politicians, he suggests, need to point out they cannot do the impossible - eg keep costs down but make sure no one ever gets hurt. (I'd say the same goes for funders.)

Also this morning someone sent me a link to a report called ‘How to Save £50 billion’, which is at least honest enough to have a clear and relatively unequivocal list of cuts in spending that the Institute of Directors and the Tiny Minority of Tax Payers Alliance think would be a good idea. Read the list and you can see which Tax Payers the Alliance voice might represent: not those like my dad living on the Basic State Pension, or families being helped by Sure Start or Education Maintenance Allowance, or the children being educated in dilapidated buildings. Not to mention the people employed as a result of the things on their little list.

This is not to deny savings are possible or even necessary in some areas. But what needs to be considered is not which expenditure lines should be reduced, but which of the outcomes we want to do without. (We do also need to remember that some of the ‘savings’ also have a direct financial cost, in terms of unemployment, but also indirect social costs – conveniently left out of most of the equations.) I’d happily live without ID cards, but I don’t want the state education system on starvation rations in horrible old buildings. (I know there are some horrible new buildings, but let’s not go there right now.)

In a sense, the public spending cuts debate could then become a part of a wholly necessary discussion about how we are living beyond the means of the planet and our real economies, and what we are prepared to forgo, and how we can reinvent our ways of living and working. That’s obviously also a discussion that is ongoing in culture, and we at Arts Council are constantly making the case as strongly as humanly possible that money spent on culture is well spent and productive. A more mature language for the overall debate can only help us in that.

More thoughts on Expressive Lives

As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve been on holiday. The first part was a real ‘staycation’, enjoying the Stockton International Riverside Festival, which just happens to be my local festival. Paul Harman, with whom I am rarely known to disagree, honest, describes it very well on Arts Professional here. Listening in as two classic brick-outhouse, cropheaded, tattooed Teesside Blokes debated whether BalletBoyz Next Generation was as good as the dance thing they’d seen last year, whilst waiting for Avant Garde Dance to begin, really made my weekend. Well, that and seeing the rest of the family express themselves in performance – my wife and daughter running away to join No Fit State Circus (only for the weekend, mind, in line up in photo above)in the DVC Choir in Parklife, and my son and his mates in Cold Pistols getting an early slot in the Fringe Festival (amusing that's-my-giant-boy photo below).

Anyway, that and the rest of my holiday in Norfolk – my, that period as ACE Executive Board Rural Champion had a lasting impact! - made me want to add a further note to my thinking on Expressive Lives, which is that there is a certain metropolitanism to the tone, and to the notion that we are now awash with opportunity. Not every place is like Stockton-on-Tees, after all, where we get to live expressive lives. (By metropolitanism I don’t mean London-centricity, by the way, though that’s a common manifestation. For another strain of the syndrome, again probably not malignant, see recent discussion in the States over the new NEA Chair Rocco Landesman’s comments about theatre in smaller places – here or here.)

This is then built on by a point made on Town Hall Matters by John Craig-Sharples, drawing attention to the role of local authority cultural services in supporting expressive lives. Although there are some passing references to local government in the publication, mainly in the context of funding, the role that culture can play right across a local authorities functions is underplayed. As John puts it, and as councils like Stockton at their best demonstrate, ‘Perhaps if we really grasp the potential of cultural services we would find that they may play as big a part in building the kind of communities to which we are committed, as some of the core services like social care’. This is about taking the arts out of their box and putting their influence to use throughout local provision, throughout the country.

I came across Town Hall Matters via Blogger’s Circle, which is an experiment in creating debate around blogs that fall broadly into the area of ‘public policy’. This is the first of my ‘Bloggers Circle’ inspired posts. If you’re interested in policy and politics have a look around.