IN THE DECADE since it was elected, the present Government has not been noted for a passionate commitment to the arts in Britain. It may have crowed from time to time about revenue generated by the arts and certainly there was increased funding mid-term, but no really sustained policy has been forthcoming. It therefore came as something of a surprise to find the Prime Minister holding a press conference at Tate Modern on 6th March to celebrate achievements in the arts during his ten years in office. Selected journalists and arts leaders were invited to Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall (occupied, with delicious irony, by Carsten Höller’s helter-skelter slides) to hear what amounted to a panegyric on the cultural good health of the nation, on the entrepreneurial dynamism of its representatives and the fact that Britain has become, in the last decade, ‘the world’s creative hub’. Apparently it was the longest speech ever given by a prime minister on this particular subject. But if one studies the available transcript and an accompanying brochure, Culture and Creativity in 2007, issued by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, it becomes increasingly unclear what the Government’s role has been in fostering the arts and what it should be.

Early in his speech, the Prime Minister approvingly quoted a participant in a Downing Street seminar held in preparation for his address that ‘we would look back on the last ten years as a “golden age” for the arts’. To anyone professionally involved in any specific branch of the arts, this is surely an eye-opener. A ‘golden age’ is a term retrospectively applied to a period that sees a flowering and consolidation of a particular activity or an era of exceptional prosperity. What, one immediately asks, did the Prime Minister have in mind – beyond the gilding of his legacy as he prepares to depart from office – in applying this shining epithet to the decade of his premiership? Was it a reflection of the period’s soaring achievements in the arts in the hands of its creative artists? Or an acknowledgement of the increase in public ‘accessibility’ to theatres and museums? Here he rightly pointed to the ending of museum admission charges as a feather in the Government’s cap (even if the agitation to abolish them was not confined to the Government). Was he perhaps referring to the changes in standards that have occurred in the media and in broadcasting? Or perhaps it was more to the socio-economic benefits brought about by investment in the arts, for he went on to quote an impressive list of examples of ‘cultural regeneration’, from the borough of Southwark (where he was speaking) to the jewellery quarter of Birmingham, schemes undertaken in a ‘mixed economy’ of public funding (primarily from the National Lottery), private enterprise and ‘the box office’ – the Keynesian ideal of arts patronage. Perhaps through a combination of all these reasons he was able to announce that ‘a renaissance in British culture’ had taken place under the present Government.

When, in the following days, this speech was reported in the media, reactions were decidedly chilly. Several commentators appeared to have been living in ignorance of this ‘golden age’ and were ambushed by the Prime Minister’s passion for culture, kept under wraps for a decade until his Tate Modern confession. Some were struck by the fact that the speech was held in perhaps the most successful visual arts project of the decade, Tate Modern, which received no direct government finance. Yet more could not square the speech’s upbeat message with the reality of, say, museum and library staff cuts and underfunding (leading to a restriction of access); regional museums starved by local councils; the closing of arts centres and disbanding of music groups – examples of all of which have recently been in the news. But most agreed that some crumbs of comfort, even reassurance, were to be had from the Prime Minister’s concluding statement that the Government had ‘avoided boom and bust in the economy’ and that there was no intention ‘to resume it in arts and culture’. But the small print of this avowal – that the Prime Minister was aware of concerns that money might be siphoned from the arts to fund the Olympic Games of 2012 – should have been reported in bold upper-case type. In the following week it was announced by the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport that, owing to the escalating costs of the Olympics, a further £675 million would be taken from Lottery funds, bringing the total to over £2 billion diverted to the Games. The crumbs of comfort came from a poisoned loaf.

That this diversion of Lottery funds will have serious consequences in many areas of the arts, particularly among small community projects, goes without saying. But it is compounded by threatened cuts in government grants to larger institutions such as museums and galleries, reductions rumoured to be around seven per cent per annum for three years. This will undoubtedly harm already fragile budgets and limit exhibition programmes. Arts leaders are bracing themselves for the soon-to-be-published Comprehensive Spending Review, the Treasury’s fundamental examination of future expenditure. We can only pray that such planning will address certain fundamental, long-outstanding problems faced by museums, among them their increasing difficulty in making essential acquisitions (to attract those newly enlarged audiences so warmly endorsed by the Prime Minister) and the provision of tax-breaks to encourage private philanthropy (both of which points were prominent features of the 2004 Goodison Review). But until the imminent Budget and the publication of the Spending Review reveal the Government’s intentions towards the arts, adding substance, we hope, to the Prime Minister’s speech, the raid on Lottery funds is something we can only deplore.