Paul Kelly looks at the impact political change can have on cultural delivery
The culture of governance is always going to get more attention than the governance of culture, and the past couple of weeks has seen a raft of political stories and incidents generating quite exceptional scrutiny of a Government that seems to be wallowing in its own indiscretions. If someone were to write a play about it, it would be dismissed as too fanciful to be real.
Yet dramas on the national stage can also have local reverberations that can affect even the arts. Local elections across England have seen dramatic swings at national and local levels. There is a sense of change in the air and this change may have a further negative impact on a local government arts ecology already showing signs of worrying cuts and decline. One of the largely unseen challenges faced by local government arts officers is managing the impact of political change, be it a change from one administration to another or, increasingly, from political control to no overall control.
Local government arts officers care about the arts and want to protect both their funding and the organisations they support that deliver much of the front-line service. And to do so, they have to understand the local political and geographical nuances. Protecting your budget can sometimes be all about pleasing your politicians and that means that particular projects, neighbourhoods and even artforms can get attention purely on the basis of political considerations. And if the Council changes and a new portfolio holder is appointed, then it is the cue for a new round of meetings and briefings to bring them up to speed, establish their policy priorities and introduce them to the principal cultural players. This is democracy at work, yet it isnt always helpful to developing consistent delivery over the long term.
Recently, nalgao was invited to go to Northern Ireland to meet with its Forum for Local Government and the Arts (FLGA). This is a forum of elected members, arts officers and staff from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. There is a tendency to think of Northern Ireland purely in terms of conflict, so it was a pleasant surprise to find a cultural planning model that encourages dialogue and engagement. Under the terms of a current proposal, local government is being restructured from 26 District Councils to 7 much larger Unitary Authorities. It is the sort of restructuring that we can expect in England in the next three years or so if the current government can last that long.
The Northern Ireland FLGA has 78 members too big, you might argue, to be anything more than a talking shop. Yet, nalgao found it to be a body that enables dialogue between key participants and encourages consistency and long-term development within an environment of periodic political change. And, most importantly, it is a structure that enables local authorities to have an ongoing and mature dialogue with the Arts Council, both at officer and elected member level. It seems to nalgao that the FLGA offers a culture of governance that can only be good for the governance of culture. Shouldnt the arts in England adopt something similar? Well, of course, what I have just described is the way that the old Regional Arts Associations used to operate. But we cant turn the clock back. Or can we? n
Paul Kelly is Joint Vice Chair of nalgao and Principal Arts Officer, Plymouth City Council.
e: nalgao@aol.com