At a time when arts institutions are in uproar over the Treasury's cack-handed plan to tax non-domiciles, the Culture Secretary seems to have blown in from another world. He has drawn up an extensive list of schemes to turn Britain into the “world's creative hub”. Britain already performs strongly in the creative industries, as the Green Paper next week will acknowledge. But Andy Burnham apparently sees a need for a host of new quangos, a national film centre, a Davos-style global arts conference, and a “high-fashion production hub” to support the “co-ordination of the fashion industry”, an industry that seemed to be doing quite well without ministerial meddling.
The Victoria and Albert Museum, the Tate and the Courtauld Institute of Art say that a significant number of their most generous supporters are non-doms, who may turn away from Britain unless Alistair Darling's promised rethink has bite. Such successful institutions might prefer that Government performed its core function of taxation properly, rather than extend the State into yet more areas. For the amounts of money that could be lost from non-domiciles dwarf the additional funds available to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) when the public finances are under strain.
It is not clear why business could not organise a global arts conference, should one be needed, nor why ministers should see the need to lecture cultural organisations that “diversity is a creative imperative”. Chris Smith, the former Culture Secretary, did important work in identifying the creative industries. But in attempting to draw a line around the whole creative universe, and bureaucratise it, his former adviser Mr Burnham has produced a draft document that looks likely to create more work for management consultants than struggling artists.
It is hard to disagree with the suggestion that schoolchildren should spend more time on cultural activities. It could even be transforming, in a curriculum that can be deadening. It is absolutely right that more children should be offered the chance to learn an instrument. But the proposal that children will have a “right” to five hours' “culture” a week is both too prescriptive, in terms of time, and too vague in terms of what the activity should be. Five hours wandering around a museum could be monotony. Five hours of learning to act or sing could be inspirational. The Government's determination to lump everything together as a cultural activity obscures its meaning. If “making a piece of visual art” means a painting or a collage, why not just say so?
The truth is that the DCMS is a strange amalgam that is always looking for a narrative to bind its disparate parts together. Many of its ministers have been talented people en route to a bigger job. In seeking to make their mark, they cast around for big ideas, which are sometimes dangerous. If only the DCMS were not led by a young tyro, but a beloved grandee - not an administrator as much as an ambassador. Exit Mr Burnham stage right. Enter Lord Attenborough.
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These latest gimmicks may not amount to much, given the Government's tight budgets. But the thread that links them is an apparent belief that government can engender creativity, and a tendency to channel slender resources into quangos. That is not creative, it is naive.