Were ArtsProfessional Wales-based, anyone reading your last two treatments of the arts scene there (‘Cash Package for WMC’, AP 158 and ‘One Wales – one vision’, AP 159) would assume that the Welsh Culture Minister had a close relative, or at least a mole, in your editorial team. For how does he achieve such consistent encomia in the face of very much grimmer reality? As a confessing Welsh person, I have no wish to compound stereotypes but I must say that I recognise considerable fog and no little romanticism in what we have been presented with in these articles, and I would have hoped for other voices than politicians’ and their press releases, and a considerably increased critical distance from their assertions.
I don’t want to dwell at any length upon what is being presented as ministerial “success” in generally increasing funding, but that success is certainly not being felt on the ground. And what kind of success in planning can the necessity for writing off Wales Millennium Centre’s debt of £13.5m (and increasing its annual grant to £3.5m “next year and in each succeeding financial year to 2020/11”) represent?...