Ralph Waldo Emerson famously said, “If you strike at a king, you must kill him.” Attempts have been made on the life of Arts Council England (ACE) as on other arts councils, and many would be willing to bet that it will survive them all. (Arts Council Wales did, after all, though the Scottish Arts Council now probably has to be counted among the undead.) The New Culture Forum’s intention with Marc Sidwell’s report (p3) must have been to blast ACE out of the water, but they’ve done nothing more than bruise their shins. ACE has been able to point to dozens of errors and misinterpretations of data in the report – including the idea that The B of the Bang was an ACE failure (ACE didn’t fund it at all) and that 185 theatres lost their grants in the 2007 funding review (33 did). However, it’s interesting that ACE doesn’t specifically refute other charges – that the Chief Executive’s pay rose by 93% between 1999 and 2005, for example (revealed by Charles Morgan in AP90), or that ACE spent £707,176 on recruitment consultants between 2003 and 2008. Of course ACE is flawed – its own response to the document says that “no organisation can deny that it can improve and ACE has been very clear in its desire... to do just that”. But all quangos are problematic – hence the current hue and cry being whipped up against them by the political elite. Sidwell and his NCF chums must be fuming by now: even the Tories, whom they aim to support, have rebuffed the idea of abolishing ACE, while commentators have rained down criticism on the report. Baroness McIntosh and Sir Brian McMaster, who are extensively quoted, will not align themselves with such a shoddy piece of work. And there’s the problem – there are many out there who would agree with Tim Joss that ACE is “past its use-by date” (p3), and who yearn for intelligent, high-profile critiques of the current system. They will be tearing their hair out with frustration over this missed opportunity. Political spin has triumphed over fact-checking, and too much credence has been given to passionate opinions unsupported by fact. It’s also lacking in realism: the truth is that there is no way that any government will abolish ACE, because it wouldn’t want to take on what it does.
Catherine Rose
Editor