The arms-length principle is currently under threat across the UK, but was it only ever a thin veil enabling government to evade responsibility for making choices while masking its instrumental agendas for the arts? Christopher Gordon explores the background to the shifting sands of UK arts policy.
On Sunday 12 February The Observer carried a news in brief item headed Minister warns Arts Council to shape up. This arose out of David Lammys speech to the Association of British Orchestras (ABO) conference in Gateshead. Ten days earlier, BBC Radio 4s Front Row had transmitted one of those glib and pre-polarised media debates about whether the Arts Council (of England) should finally be put to sleep, with contestants Sir Christopher Frayling in the red corner and Andrew Brighton in the blue. This staged fight arose out of the very recent publication of the latters essay Consumed by the political: the ruination of the Arts Council.
Does anyone really care any more, or has the residual value of the arms length simply become a topic relegated to specialist journals, think tanks and ghettoised radio magazine programmes? Where is there any significant public debate about the erosion or destruction of the basis of UK public arts policy development and support since 1945? Anyone out there recall Superman Sir Peter Halls star-studded Shadow Arts Council which was going to save us all from a wicked interfering government and supine Arts Council in 2001? No? Thought not.
Interpretations
In the Alice in Wonderland world of Tony Blair, Lammy the Wunderkind seems to have hinted to the ABO that the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) might in future be funding the larger arts institutions directly, while a castrated Arts Council England would be allocating its remaining money according to, er... well, government policy. Greetings, democratic accountability. Game Andrew Brighton? What price now for a slightly foxed copy of Tessa Jowells 2004 personal essay Government and the Value of Culture? (The same Tessa Jowell who wants to encourage Lottery punters to mark the back of their ticket to specify their favoured good cause more or less guaranteed to lose money from the arts share originally specified in the 1993 legislation, Id wager.) To be fair, her plea for continuing public subsidy for the arts and for culture to be closer to the heart of government policy-making are by no means inconsistent with what now seems to be happening. It is only the institutionally-led professional cultural sector, as ever, which sees this as some sort of constitutional outrage.
Raymond Williams had already by 1979 renamed the damaged principle as wrists length, concluding that at best it had never really represented much more than the removal of directly traceable control by government. Might Williams today have argued in favour of the DCMSs overall policy framework? The English vested interests, true to form, speak in self-protective code and mutter about the Minister having been off centre with his criticisms of their Arts Council, but in the other three constituent parts of the UK, the messages are coming through loud and clear.
Up in the air
In Northern Ireland the Arts Councils former functions look set to be redistributed amongst the local authorities. The devolved and democratically elected Scottish Executives Cultural Commission seems to be firmly behind a proposal to strip the Scottish Arts Council of its traditional role in funding the major institutions, which the six major companies themselves seem to support, and indeed have encouraged. It is looking like a partnership of Scottish Executive and local government, with the winged and increasingly marginal Arts Council left flapping helplessly on the ground. The Welsh professional arts sector, in an oft-rehearsed Cambrian ritual down the years, seems to have recanted at the eleventh hour, rallying to save its unloved and debilitated Arts Council. The Assembly has forced the Arts Minister to grant one last stay of execution for consultation. Meanwhile, the British arms-length model is migrating around the world (like a swan carrying avian flu?), being much discussed and adapted in Eastern Europe and interestingly South Africa as countries painfully devise successor systems to replace malign political control and censorship under communism or apartheid. What goes around comes around.
Historical precedent
British governments have a much longer and more overtly instrumental involvement with art and cultural policy than is generally admitted. The founding principles of the British Museum as a public institution set by Parliament in 1753 state as its purpose to allow visitors to address through objects, both ancient and more recent, questions of contemporary politics and international relations. This derives from Lockes 17th century ethos of civic humanism, which meant that knowledge should have civic outcomes. The Royal Society of Arts (founded 1760) was established with a pretty instrumental purpose, as was Sir Henry Coles setting up of the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1852 immediately following the Great Exhibition. Its primary aims were directed to art and design education reforms, international trade and diplomacy, and tourism almost entirely practical. The 1845 Museums Act permitted local authorities to establish institutions for the entertainment and instruction of their inhabitants while the Public Libraries Act of that same year encouraged municipalities over a certain size to levy a rate towards library provision. The British arts and cultural infrastructure located municipally (but often created philanthropically) is largely a creature of instrumentalism or enlightened self-interest.
Philanthropic vision
Fast forward to the 20th century. The National Federation of Music Societies, now re-branded as Making Music, was established in 1935 with Carnegie UK Trust money (as was the Voluntary Arts Network in 1989). The 1940 prototype for the post-war Arts Council of Great Britain relied on Pilgrim Trust money to shift the Treasury and the Board of Education initially (both of these Trusts are endowed out of USA-derived fortunes). The model for the Regional Arts Associations was set out in a 1959 Gulbenkian Foundation study, long before its more comprehensive and hugely influential 1976 Redcliffe Maud Report on support structures for the arts. Gulbenkian has also been responsible for many of the key cultural initiatives over the years on community arts and participation, arts and education, ethnic minorities, community music and radio, etc., frequently having correctly identified needs or trends years before government or the arts councils acknowledged their importance. Frequently the arts councils have only observed rather cautiously from a safe distance. It was Gulbenkian, we should recall, which paid for the Arts Councils first Education Officer for 3 years to establish the department. The Secretary-General could not even persuade his own Council to support his own most committed innovation!
Back to the future
The people who are now regarded as the authoritative cultural leaders have mostly made their careers within the developed public subsidy system of the welfare state. These people and their generally supportive metropolitan media cheerleaders tend to think outwards from national performing arts companies which are, effectively, all post-war creations. The generational shift in managers and multi-disciplinary activity which is now evident will incrementally contribute to a change in attitudes and, in time, infrastructure. Looking at the behaviour of UK governments as it has impacted on cultural policy and delivery since 1979, and at the longer perspective up until the Second World War, it begins to look as if the golden age from 19451979 may possibly just have been an aberrant interlude in the British instrumental and pragmatic norm. Perhaps you dont need to be a swivel-eyed economic libertarian to entertain the thought that it might still be set and match to Andrew Carnegies fellow son of Fife, Adam Smith.
Christopher Gordon has 35 years experience as an arts professional in the public sector, and is now an independent consultant in cultural policy.
e: christophergordon@compuserve.com