Speak now or…

We’ve seen different agendas come and go in arts funding over the years. Remember the days when ‘young people’ were flavour of the month? Then diversity, and audience development, and participation. And what about social exclusion… closely followed by its more politically correct opposite, social inclusion? Grant applications that were able to address these various agendas suddenly became more successful than those that didn’t. Arts organisations generally know how the system works and have become accustomed to responding to it, on the basis that getting hold of the money is generally better than not getting it. So when the Prime Minister announces that ‘Wellbeing’ is the agenda of the moment, and tells the country that future Government policy decisions will be aiming to improve individual wellbeing, he’s giving a signal – loud and clear – that this is where the money is going to be spent. Our antennae should therefore be on full alert when we read (p1) that the response to a national debate on wellbeing was so lukewarm about cultural activity that this has been excluded from the ONS proposals for how to measure wellbeing. Assuming that governments work on the premise that ‘what’s measured is what matters’, then unless something is done to get measures such as the DCMS’s Taking Part survey included in the basket of tools for assessing national wellbeing, the arts could be consigned for a generation to a position on the margins of political consciousness, dismissed as irrelevant to quality of life. We’ve got until 23 January to speak up – or forever hold our peace.