Last word

Gissa job?
Employment is in the news once more, with the movement for paid internships (p1) not quite being balanced out by the Government’s recession-busting attempts at creating minimum wage culture jobs (p2). It will be interesting, however, to see whether the young people employed on the Future for Jobs scheme come from the same social background as those who take up unpaid internships, or whether a broader church will be served by the programme. We at AP have tried to follow up a rumour that Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs may be preparing guidelines for paid internships, but they haven’t managed to tell us anything. We can only hope they’re reading the Arts Group’s ‘Emerging Workers’ report (p1). The revelation that 40% of graduates entering the culture sector are doing unpaid work in order to get a foot in the door should be a matter of shame for the sector – and it should be a cause for alarm, since so many talented people could be shut out. As the burden of fees and debt increase on students in higher education, those from lower income backgrounds will be less and less able to become professionals in the cultural sector. On the positive side, it’s extremely impressive that Theatre Resource – which, although it is the largest disability arts organisations in England, is still no giant – has been able to create 56 jobs. It bears out what the New Deal of the Mind told us many months ago (AP195), that there is capacity in the culture sector to give meaningful and constructive work to many. But a lot of arts workers, especially those who have seen their livelihoods threatened in some way over the past year, may be wondering what will happen when these short-term jobs come to an end. Can the economy keep this new workforce going?

Dreams made manifest
Aren’t political manifestos lovely? The three main parties are all trying to open up a whole new world of hope, and yet sounding curiously similar to each other. The Lib Dems’ new paper, ‘The Power of Creativity’ (trans: ‘we are, like, totally down with the current jargon’), puts forward some interesting ideas, but – as usual – if we want to see any of them put into practice we will have to hope that Labour or the Tories will nick them. They are completely on-message with the ‘excellence agenda’, riding the pendulum of opinion as it swings away from the age of box-ticking. “We will move away from restrictive and meaningless targets,” they insist, “and instead focus on providing high quality cultural provision for everyone regardless of location, income, ethnicity or gender”. Some might wonder how they will achieve the second half of that aim without some kind of monitoring, evaluation or, er, target-setting. Perhaps what we really need is broad and meaningful targets, if such things are possible. We will watch with interest.