What kind of society do we want?
Woman’s Wales? is a new book published next month which is packed full of essays about what devolution has really meant for women in Wales. Here, as part of a new Weekend series featuring edited versions of those essays, Yvonne Murphy gives a rallying cry
AN URBAN myth was doing the rounds nearly 10 years ago on social media. It went something like this: “When Winston Churchill was asked to cut arts funding in favour of the war effort, he simply replied, ‘Then what are we fighting for?’.” There is no known record of Churchill actually saying this.
He did say: “The arts are essential to any complete national life. The state owes it to itself to sustain and encourage them.”
The Second World War provided a horrific impetus for us to imagine the sort of society we wanted after the conflict, which led to the creation of the NHS and the Arts Council.
More than 70 years later, we must once again seriously consider what kind of society we want. We need some fresh radical thinking and we must ensure that creatives and artists are “at the table” and embedded in that reimagining.
In the 2023 the Arts Council of Wales investment review, 139 organisations across Wales and all art forms applied for the holy grail of multi-year funding. Eighty-one organisations were successful. Of the 58 who didn’t make the grade, a handful were previously core funded, the largest of those being National Theatre of Wales. This process followed hot on the heels of the Arts Council of England’s investment review, which also oversaw large-scale organisations losing their funding, followed by much analysis and challenging of the process and decision-making. The recurring theme is that arts councils are making tough decisions with too small a pot of gold and whatever way they slice the pie there’s not going to be enough to go around.
And yet since this article was originally written in October 2023, the Welsh Government has proposed a staggering 10.5% cut in funding to the Arts Council of Wales.
This article is not going to dig into the weeds of the Arts Council of Wales’ investment review. Instead this article is concerned with a wider lens and more urgent question. If, as Churchill stated, the arts are “essential to any complete national life”, shouldn’t the state be “sustaining and encouraging the arts” as a priority?
Let’s begin with that phrase “the arts” and take a step back in history before we look to the future.
The foundation of the arts councils that we know today was laid in 1940 when a Committee for Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA) was set up during the war. Its chair John Maynard Keynes said its aim was “to carry music, drama and pictures to places which otherwise would be cut off from all contact with the masterpieces of happier days and times... the duty of CEMA was to maintain the opportunities of artistic performance for the hard-pressed and often exiled civilians”.
CEMA’S initial aim was to “replace what had been taken away” by war but “we soon found that we were providing what had never existed even in peacetime,” the globally famous economist added.
This led to the Arts Council of Britain being founded in 1946. The shift away from “the arts” being seen as a private good and luxury affordable to only a minority, to a public good accessible and available to all had begun in earnest. However, CEMA’S and in turn the Arts Council’s vision and objective of supporting and “spreading” what many termed “elite culture” or “high art” created tensions and sparked criticisms which have continued to reverberate to this very day, despite the significant change of direction and scope with the appointment of Jennie Lee as the first Arts Minister in 1964.
The subsequent period from the appointment of Lee to the beginning of the Thatcher premiership is often regarded as the “golden age” of the Arts Council, with increased access to artistic practice, support for avant-garde art forms and “a redefinition of popular culture away from reductive assignations to the commercial sphere”.
State-funded arts thrived for over a decade, including community arts and theatre-ineducation, reaching a high point in the late 1970s. However, with a political backlash to Keynesian economics at the end of the ‘70s and the prioritisation of a market-led economy came a backlash to the very principles and vision which had formed the arts council. The principle of state-sponsored cultural production and cultural democracy were challenged and a new cultural strategy of reduced public expenditure and the growth of private sponsorship and philanthropy and commercial imperatives began and has continued ever since.
The notion of arts and culture being a private good gained new ground and a three-pillar funding model for the arts was established – state, philanthropy, commercial – which has remained mainly unchallenged ever since – as I discussed in a blog back in 2015 – including even when arts, culture and media became devolved.
Those commercial imperatives meant that the “creative industries” were separated out from arts and culture and heritage and treated as entirely separate because they could be monetised and were therefore apparently worth a different level of investment, seemingly without any understanding that the creative sector is one ecology.
A performer, a writer, a designer, a director will move across art forms and creative genres, from screen to gaming to animation and then across all aspects of live performance, because it is one ecology. A visual artist will work with a recording artist, a spoken-word poet, a musician, a tightrope walker, a games designer and a film director and see no boundaries. This one ecology includes publications like Wales Arts Review which are a vital component of a healthy creative sector providing a critical lens, a platform for creative voices and public access to the work.
A starting point, therefore, would be to accept and acknowledge we have one creative sector in both Wales and the UK and move on from the pre-war term “arts” and the more recent term “culture”, both of which alienate and segregate. Instead of unhelpful and artificial categories imposed on us – “the creative industries”, “the arts”, “the arts and cultural sector”, “visual and performing arts” – could we begin to use one term to describe one ecology within which all artists and creatives exist? The term “the creative sector” would perhaps suffice?
A second stage would be to address the unhelpful requirement for the sector to constantly articulate and defend its very existence. Creatives have been in a defensive position in the UK for decades. Margaret Thatcher called for the arts and cultural sector to make the case for culture and define it in economic terms. More than 40 years later we are still required to constantly rearticulate and provide evidence for the value and impact of arts, culture and creativity to society and forced to allocated scarce resources to explaining and defending the fundamental right of humans to access, produce and participate in creative activities. The creative sector has become increasingly mired in evidence-gathering and data collection to prove its worth and justify its very existence to society.
There is endless qualitative and quantitative evidence of the impact that accessing and participating in creative activities have on everything from mental health and wellbeing to tackling anti-social behaviour and polarisation to increasing civic engagement and creating
When Winston Churchill was asked to cut arts funding in favour of the war effort, he simply replied, ‘Then what are we fighting for?’
cohesive communities. The benefits of using creative approaches to rehabilitation, conflict resolution, training and team-building and as the most effective and low-cost strategy for urban regeneration is well-documented. As is using creatives and their output as a diplomatic tool and “soft power”. Access to and participation in creative activities is vital for a healthy and democratic society. Creative activities help us to express ourselves, make sense of the world and fine-tune our critical thinking, debating, deliberation, collaboration and consensusreaching skills, as well as encouraging us to challenge and critique. Ritual storytelling can help us to reflect and understand and therefore reform our social and political structures.
If we accept all of the above, we can move on from the “why” to the “how” and begin to look at how we fund that one ecology, that one creative sector.
The vision of one organisation to fund that one ecology which was at arm’s-length from the government was a strong and clear vision: “independent in constitution, free from red tape”, as Keynes put it.
Unfortunately, the notion of creatives being funded at arm’s-length has been recently undermined by Westminster through levelling-up funding which leapfrogs devolved parliaments and arts councils. It has also been somewhat undermined in Wales by the creation of Creative Wales, a government-run agency, which has further cemented the false divide between the
“creative industries” and the “arts and cultural sector”.
While I applaud Creative Wales for creating a long-overdue memorandum of understanding with the Arts Council of Wales (ACW), it does not answer the question of why we need two separate organisations. Particularly in a small nation where we need fewer structures and less bureaucracy and more collaboration, partnership working and joined-up thinking, if we are to meet the goals and ways of working set out in the Well-being of Future Generations Act. If we accept we have one ecology, then surely we need one independent arm’s-length funding body with enough money to invest in that whole creative sector properly?
As a sector we consistently punch above our weight on the global stage. Imagine what we could achieve with proper investment. If we accept the return on investment into the creative sector and that it is the fastest-growing sector in the UK economy, it would seem to be a no-brainer to invest in that winning horse.
The Arts Council of Wales (ACW) 2023 investment review had applications submitted to the total of almost £54m, a good indicator of how much is required. The funding available to ACW to spend on core funding for creative organisations across the whole of Wales was less than £30m.
To put this in context, the Welsh Government has an annual budget of £21bn. ACW received £33.3m in 2023-24, a 1.5% decrease from the previous year. That amounted to just 0.15% of the overall government budget.
To give further context, the average government spend on culture in European countries is 1%, with some reaching 2.5%. The UK and Wales were already shockingly below this average.
Rather than this percentage being increased since this article was originally published, ACW is now facing a further cut of 10.5% to its budget for 2024-25 from the Welsh Government. As a result, ACW has had to review all costs, including being forced to make a 2.5% cut to all initial offers made to 81 successful investment review applicant organisations.
Taking into account all devolved nation governments being faced with difficult decisions due to standstill devolution settlements from the UK Government, questions must still be asked about the Welsh Government’s lack of priority being given to the fastest-growing sector in the economy. Such low investment is not justifiable. Rather than backing the winning horse, we are neglecting and undernourishing it to a fatal degree.
To summarise, my answer to the original question is in five parts:
We must accept that the creative sector is the third pillar of our civilised society. Those three pillars are a state-funded NHS to nurture our health, state-funded education to nurture the minds of the next generation and a state-funded creative sector to nurture our spirit and give us a means to both express and understand ourselves and each other and create the society and country we want now and for future generations.
We need to acknowledge and accept that the creative sector more than “washes its face” when it comes to the economy, as was evidenced once again with recently recent figures from DCMS, and begin to invest properly in the largest-growing part of the economy in line with other European countries
We need to acknowledge and accept the sector’s huge worth, value and benefit to society, beyond economics, and stop asking creatives to prove over and over again how they can impact and benefit society.
As a sector, let’s start calling ourselves one thing. Let’s own the language and the narrative. Let’s call ourselves the creative sector. Let’s accept and celebrate all the variety of creatives who exist within our sector and acknowledge that we work within one ecology that requires all of its parts to exist and thrive.
Then together, as one unstoppable force, let’s begin to collectively demand a simpler state funding system and a minimum of 1% of the annual budget that can actually sustain and encourage our creative sector to flourish and thrive within the UK and on the global stage.
Yvonne Murphy has been a freelance theatre director, producer and creative since 1992, working across the UK and internationally. In 2008 she founded Omidaze Productions and in 2013 was awarded an Arts Council of Wales Clore Fellowship. She has been an associate artist of Wales Millennium Centre, Theatr Iolo and Artis Community and a board member of Chapter Arts Centre and Awen Cultural Trust. She was an elected councillor for Penarth Town Council from 2019 to 2022 and stood as a parliamentary candidate in the 2019 general election. Yvonne works across the cultural and creative, democracy and corporate sectors and is particularly interested in the intersection between cultural and democratic participation, access and engagement, alternative economic and business models and creative learning. She is also the creator of the Democracy Box and the Talking Shop, two creative solutions aimed at correcting the democratic deficit.
An original version of this article appeared in Wales Arts Review in October 2023.
Next week in Weekend: Jasmine Donahaye on the recognition – or lack of it – for women in public life.
Woman’s Wales?, published by Parthian Books and £10.99 a copy, can be pre-ordered at www.parthianbooks.com/products/womanswales-hardback