The impact of the cuts to the arts sector has not been fully felt yet and everything is still in a state of flux, Eleanor Turney, a freelance journalist and editor of the ArtsProfessional magazine told Artsandcuts.
She fundamentally disagrees with the Conservative ideology that claims that these cuts are “necessary”, and is in favour of raising taxes for the wealthy and taxing big corporations fully rather than cutting services. “There are all kinds of stats floating around on Twitter etc which look at how much money is owed to the Treasury by tax-dodgers compared with how much money needs to be saved through these cuts,” she said.
There are economic arguments against arts cuts, she argues, such as the fact that it gives back far more than it receives in subsidies. However, she blames the culture secretary for not “fighting our corner”, in addition to the difficulty to justify spending on the arts when budgets for health and education are being squeezed.
Art Cuts have varied across different locations in the UK, which contributes to the delay of the assessment of the impact to the sector. In England, Arts Council England is in the process of sorting out how it will deal with its cuts, as it assesses 1300 applications to become National Portfolio Organisations.
“We know that only about half of these are likely to be successful, so the impact on those that don’t receive funding will be large. Add to this the Local Authority arts cuts, and things start to look pretty tricky for a lot of arts organisations. As I say, the full impact will not be felt for some months, but I think it is safe to say that many organisations will close down or have to radically re-imagine their work. So, the impact at the moment is that lots of people are getting lots of sleepless nights, waiting to find out their fate,” she said.
However, in Scotland, for example, the government has made the decisions to defer its cuts until next year, so not much has changed yet. Also, Creative Scotland is very new, so it remains to be seen how it will sort out its funding for the arts over the coming years, she said. As for Northern Ireland, it has not announced its final budget yet, but the arts look set to suffer badly and the impact will doubtless be huge if this is the case.
Furthermore, “the Arts Council of Wales suffered a cut, but has made a clear and compelling case for what it’s going to fund and what it’s not. Not everyone is happy about its decisions – namely those who lost money – but I personally think that it did the best it could with a difficult situation,” she said.
The impact on the UK’s status as a European cultural hub is also unclear at the moment as “these cuts will be felt for decades to come, and it will take months, if not years, for the extent of the damage to become apparent and for the arts to reshape itself into a resilient sector again,” she said.
She argues that it doesn’t look good to have a government that is slashing arts funding, but the picture across Europe as a whole seems to be fairly similar. “I think Germany has ring-fenced arts funding, while Belgium has cut harder and faster. We will have to see what’s left, and what arts is being made, before we can judge how it affects our reputation in the long term,” she said.
Arts & Cuts 