The Long View | An Unfit Arts Council

Like western journalists covering the war in Ukraine, it’s almost impossible for the likes of me to look upon Arts Council England’s recent round of funding decisions from a position of neutrality. To begin with - partly as a defence mechanism, a shield from the cruelty of it all - I tried to see the sense in it. Of course, Manchester should have a full-time resident opera company. It makes sense, in cash-strapped times, to have Welsh National Opera focus on Wales.

It didn’t take long for those passable arguments to crumble into irrelevance. Anger helped dissolve them. I grew up in Plymouth and was at boarding school in Bristol. Where would those cities be without Welsh National Opera’s English subsidy? Where would I be? Certainly not working, in part, as an opera critic. Plymouth has already lost its share of the Glyndebourne Tour and we know the Southwest is perennially ignored, almost entirely without professional classical music and in receipt of less than 8% of ACE money.

But we also know by now, that ACE is unable or unwilling to satisfy even its own stated objectives. It apparently believes England consists of two regions: London; and a flat-capped, soot-stained, mythical ‘north’ in dire need of the art London already has. Having lived in Liverpool, Manchester and London, I know that deeply patronizing attitude when I see it.

Incompetence is one thing. ‘Mission creep’ is another. Reducing WNO’s English budget by a third - and the Glyndebourne Tour’s by half - is so transformative that it speaks of a desire on ACE’s behalf to engineer a fundamental change in the operating model of those companies. The bizarre ultimatum to ENO doesn’t even attempt to hide that agenda. Neglecting the Southwest is a dereliction of duty. Forcing change on independent institutions using financial bribery is beyond the remit of the Arts Council. Truly, it has lost the plot.

Even if ACE’s leadership resigns, what will really change? Like the BBC, ACE has been drifting from its founding principles ever since the UK opted to start looking less like Europe and more like America. It has been forced to reinvent itself not as a turbocharger and disseminator of artistic excellence but as an agency for social change and PR that will improve the electoral prospects of the incumbent government. Having worked with ACE’s CEO Darren Henley, a man once passionate not just about musical distinction but about the institutions that deliver it, I wonder what on earth he makes of it all.

We can fight to save what’s left of English National Opera, and we must (read Richard Bratby, Leo Hussain or Charlotte Higgins for clear argumentation). But the roots of the situation we find ourselves in stretch further back, to the fallacy of justifying spend on the arts not in terms of civilization but in terms of business - a return on an investment. Did we ever believe in funding the arts in this country, really? I remain unconvinced that we have ever come to terms with our wider societal belief in cultural excellence and its relationship to the state.

This ambivalence has already been transforming Britain’s operatic landscape for a decade, as the art form steadily migrates back to its High Society origins: away from the city and to the country, to unsubsidized companies that charge high prices for tickets as they sync with the social calendar of the privileged. Meanwhile, we continue to chirrup away that opera isn’t elitist because in certain houses, it’s still cheap. Regardless of the fact that state school children don’t know what it is.

All this suits the Arts Council just fine; a resurgent, private opera scene it need never be caught associating with. There are plenty whom it doesn’t suit so well: those in cities, on moderate incomes, without cars, with children and those who need opera for empathetic sustenance the year around (and yes, those opera professionals who like their pay checks that way too). It wouldn’t suit the adolescent me living in Plymouth, Bristol and Liverpool nor the twenty-something me living in Manchester and London. The Arts Council wasn’t faultless back then, but at least it facilitated accessible excellence. What on earth is it all about now?