Cost vs value

No one can have failed to notice that we are confronting a crisis in our nation’s finances. We are offered a simple solution: radically cut public spending. We have been profligate in our ways and now must prepare for our medicine. There is an unstated idea that public spending is bad for us. Rather hard to swallow, I think. It is undeniable that the public purse must be more responsibly used – there are excesses in the arena of public expenditure. However, the concept that cuts across the board are the only solution is naïve. The arts generate far more than they cost and they represent a wonderful collaboration between the private and public sector. Every theatre visit generates a further £7.77 spending, and 29% of our overseas visitors come for our performing arts. Who wants to tell all the local restaurants or taxi drivers that the local theatre is shut?

The public arts sector creates work that the private sector cannot, and investors then exploit them to make considerable sums of money for themselves and the treasury. Who would have invested in a play featuring puppet horses set in the first world war, or starring a 100-year-old steam engine, or about the financial collapse of the a major capitalist organisation? ‘War Horse’, ‘The Railway Children’ and ‘Enron’ all originated in the subsidised theatre, currently running in the West End and reaping great dividends for the Chancellor in VAT returns. In 2007, an investment of £120m returned £100m in VAT alone, representing about 0.07% of GDP. Mr Hunt needs to recognise that you don’t get the West End without regional theatres. It is in the subsidised sector that great ideas emerge and future talents are nurtured. Out of 187 Academy Award nominees 145 started in the subsidised theatre.

Hunt’s notion that we can adopt an American form of philanthropy is sadly ill-informed, especially when one considers regional arts (see AP232). Having spent time in both LA and New York recently I was dismayed at the poverty of the theatre industry, many there were jealous of our diverse and accessible cultural life. I run a theatre that has a dedicated staff who believe in the value of public service. We are very cost effective and public investment accounts for only 24% of our turnover. There is no slack in our organisation, a cut in investment will affect what we offer our community, and as a result reduce our turnover and threaten our ability to grow. What saving does this represent? My great sadness is that our leaders seem incapable of having a proper conversation with us.

Some millionaires are telling us that we have all been too greedy and now we have to pay the price. For the past 20 years we’ve been encouraged to believe that consumerism is the glue holding society together. It would now appear that this is something of a lie. Retail therapy has been our undoing; perhaps a society investing more in a cultural life would have spent less at the mall. With the opposition in chaos, the Government is free to attack fundamental concepts that our society has rested upon since the Second World War. The uncertainty that we all feel is the result of a deliberate destabilisation, designed to fragment all opposition to the re-engineering of our cultural way of being. The shift from a society that values public service to one of small government is going to be swift and painful for many. It is without mandate and is presented as a raft of emergency measures essential to combat ‘the crisis’. Panic is a great help in this and the inevitable response is too keep one’s head down. I think it’s known as divide and rule. They are dismantling the state. The consequences for the way we lead our lives and the type of society we live in will be far reaching and irreversible.

It is sad that we are reduced to an economic argument for the arts, yet I fear that the current administration is incapable of understanding the concept that art is a right and necessity, just as much as health and education are. Without art in our lives we will be at odds, lacking the ability to empathise with our fellow beings and being less inclined to care. We should make no mistake a society without art is bound to be truly poor.