Miscilliness 12 Jan 2011

Arts Holes

by Justin 12 January 2011 13:43 Miscilliness

In the latest of my semi-regular, off-the-cuff rants I vent some of my outrage and fury at the brutal - and, most likely, unnecessary - cuts the Tories are inflicting upon arts and culture in the UK.

For last year's election the UK was faced with a scintillating lose/lose scenario: there was no way Labour was going to get back into power with the shadow of Tony Blair still hanging over it; meanwhile despite their recent surge in popularity no one had any confidence in the Liberal Democrats' ability to handle power; and you would have to be clinically insane to put David Cameron in Downing Street. Consequently there was no real surprise that the election resulted in a hung parliament, but no one ever expected two parties as ideologically opposed as the Lib Dems and the Conservatives to shack up together.

Of course, now it seems fairly clear that the power balance within the coalition is somewhat represented by that old Spitting Image sketch about the SDP Liberal Alliance - to paraphrase: "We'll take the 'Conservative' partfrom our name and the 'Party' bit from yours..." In short, we have a Tory government in power and a Liberal Democrat Party which has sold its soul for a whiff of that power.

For most creatively minded people I would imagine seeing the Tories in power was as much of a nightmare come true as it was for me (and I'm not even a UK resident anymore). We expected the worst and somehow the Tories managed to go several steps even further than that. I've spent the last several months raging inside (and sometimes on Twitter) each time I see news of another cut to arts funding, of libraries threatened with closure, of community projects forced into cancellation. The Tories would have us believe that the cuts are necessary, that the country is in dire financial straits, that 'austerity' is the only path to recovery. Others argue that the country is in no worse a financial position that it has been in recent history. I'm not an economist but I suspect the truth lies further away from the Tory line than it does from the counter argument.

However, there are some simple mathematics to bear in mind here. Some of the cuts, ostensibly to save the UK from spiralling into financial oblivion, amount to just a few million here, maybe a couple of tens of millions there - nothing particularly significant in the larger scale of things, but near-fatal to the organisations that are having to bear these so-called savings. Now, as has been eagerly publicised of late the Tories could have made all of their savings (and probably then some) simply by making Vodafone UK pay its £6 billion tax bill - not million: billion! Let's repeat: just by getting one single company to pay the money they owe to the UK the Tories could have made all their cuts unnecessary.
But, of course, they didn't do that.
Why not?

Crazy theory time

Here's a theory, it's not mine, it does veer pretty close to conspiracy nut stuff, but I'm pretty sure there must be a nugget of truth in it.
Governments want to keep us stupid, they don't want us to be educated and all thinking-for-ourselves and stuff because it makes it harder for them to tell us what to think. They don't want us cultured because then we'll have vision and imagination and we'll start to consider the various ways in which we could make the world a better place to live in. They don't want us lazing around either, not when there's rubbish to be collected, offices to be cleaned, buses to be driven (I want to add a personal note here: these are among the most important jobs in the world; the people who do them should be lauded because without them the world stops). Meanwhile the rich people who can afford education, and who are the ones who tend to end up leading our governments, can continue unchallenged in their lofty echelons.

I was going to run through a few of the things that are threatened with virtual extinction because of the Tory Cuts (for instance: the Film Council has already gone http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2010/nov/05/film-council-cuts-scriptwriters-festival while the BFI, its ostensible successor, is having to deal with its own cuts-engineered redundancies and closures - http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/dec/16/bfi-cut-jobs-close-gallery - , the Booktrust charity was only saved from extinction following a massive public outcry http://www.booktrust.org.uk/show/feature/Home/Booktrust-funding-update) but instead I'm just going to focus on libraries.
In short the government is forcing local councils to cut spending and libraries, like any component of the arts, are an inevitable soft target - the result is the prospect of one in five libraries being closed. This is horrifying. Libraries are one of the few places you can go to escape the world, to improve yourself, to dream about the future, to feel like a member of your community. Perhaps more importantly it's a place you take your children, a wonderland with a seemingly infinite supply of reading pleasure, a place where your child starts to dream and experience a far bigger world.

And all this is for free. Or should be.

Cue mood music ...

It's a touch melodramatic but it feels to me like the Tories are intent on taking people's dreams away. You are no longer allowed to gaze beyond the immediate confines of your council house, your shitty job, your slowly dying hometown. The rise in university fees may well make further education too expensive for most to consider, meanwhile the government says it can't afford that playground that was supposed to go up in your local park.

I may be totally off the wall, but the spending cuts could be seen as a bid to return to the old class structure of England - a working class that has to scrimp and save to move upwards, and an upper class who hold the money and education, and therefore, power by birthright. I don't think it's quite that severe, and it remains to be seen what the full impact of these cuts will be, but I can't imagine there won't be a resultant widening of whatever class divide still exists.

I could go on but you probably get the point by now. You'll gather by my tone that I am opposed to the Tories in almost every way. I have no idea if things would have been any better under a Labour government and we all know they committed their own share of dastardly deeds (and it's hard to think of a worse crime than leading your country into an illegal war under false pretences) but it should at least be clear that I would be appalled by these cuts regardless of which side of the political spectrum they crawled out from.

Comments

no comments