Margot Finn
How deleterious is the current UK government’s assault on the arm’s-length principle in museums? How long is a piece of string? On the one hand, it’s easy to exaggerate the impact of a few trustee appointments made by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS), hand-picked to enforce a faddish government line on ‘contested heritage’. On the other, it’s unwise to downplay the chilling effect of this shift away from an already labile principle, particularly when this trend is set against the backdrop of the major structural challenges faced by museums in peri-pandemic Britain. These are exceptionally challenging times for our cultural organisations. They need the culture wars orchestrated by the Secretary of State for Culture about as much as soldiers on campaign need trench foot.
I’m a happy veteran of the 2010–15 coalition government’s arm’s-length approach to DCMS appointments to museum boards, having served as a trustee of the V&A in two successive terms from 2012–18. The interview for this public appointment, chaired by the philanthropist and Tory party donor Sir Paul Ruddock, like the ensuing board meetings under his leadership, was robust, free-ranging and non-partisan. And all the stronger for that.
In the past decade, our understanding of the damaging effects of groupthink on corporate decision-making and corporate profits has grown apace. While museums are not only or principally businesses, their bottom lines do count. For institutions in receipt of grant-inaid, profit margins have necessarily become a matter of concern as Treasury funding has annually diminished. Reports from trustees and would-be trustees of implicit and explicit requirements to adhere to highly politicised interpretations of British history fly in the face of the diversity of thought and personnel that businesses increasingly associate with corporate success. New demands that trustees adhere to cultural groupthink are being made precisely at a time when the ability of museums to optimise decision-making – and to return to ‘profit’ – has acquired existential urgency.
Arm’s-length, of course, has never been a scrupulously observed principle. Adherence has varied over time, among institutions and between chairs and DCMS mandarins. Lacking proper statutory protection, its implementation has relied on good faith, on cross-party observance and on fair play.
Today, in the English museum sector, that mutual respect increasingly appears to be more honoured in the breach than the observance. (Devolution has to date spared Scotland and Wales these polemical indignities.) The recent resignation of Sir Charles Dunstone from the chair of the Royal Museums Greenwich, prompted by the government’s refusal to reappoint an allegedly ‘decolonising’ trustee, Aminul Hoque, demonstrates that the rejection of arm’s-length principles has moved beyond cross-party politics to intra-party contests. Dunstone is himself a Tory party donor. If this is a war on ‘woke’, it is a very weird war on woke.
The most pressing needs of the museum sector remain structural and financial. Can institutions made increasingly reliant on marketing their exhibitions and facilities survive and flourish in the context of Covid-19 and the climate emergency? The Treasury’s pandemic largesse is at best temporary. And, as the report of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities made clear earlier this year, structural deficits are not so much a blind spot as a supermassive black hole in current government thinking.
Keeping eyes on the prize matters. Securing museums’ finances is a priority. Maintaining freedom of thought and expression within the museum sector is vital at all levels. But trustees are cogs in much larger mechanisms, and overemphasising their significance is potentially counter-productive. Nor are museums hermetically sealed institutions that engage only with their trustees. We need to monitor and protest the erosion of arm’s-length governance of our cherished cultural institutions, but not to lose sight of the forest for the trees.
Meanwhile, for museums operating outside the DCMS envelope, there will likely be rich pickings among trustee prospects. Applicants with expertise in digital technologies and digital humanities or with cutting-edge knowledge of new research in material histories (including but not only histories of slavery, migration and empire), but who carry the ‘wrong’ cultural credentials for Mr Dowden, will be in abundant supply. One museum’s culture war may be another museum’s organisational opportunity.
Margot Finn was a trustee of the V&A from 2012–18. She is professor of modern British history at University College London and from 2016–20 was president of the Royal Historical Society.