Readers respond to a Guardian editorial on the peripatetic puppet – and the slow commodification of culture in England
Your excellent leader (The Guardian view on Little Amal: telling the unpalatable truth, 20 October) is a timely reminder of the proper value of art in an era when irony seems to have expired with the appointment of culture secretaries such as Oliver Dowden and Nadine Dorries. In England, this apparent decline in how we see our culture has been accompanied by the slow erosion of integrity, over the past 35 years, in an increasingly politically compromised Arts Council.
This trend began in 1985 under William Rees-Mogg’s chairmanship, when the Arts Council’s annual bid to the Treasury was published as a glossy “prospectus” at the time of Thatcher’s privatisation of public assets. It was entitled A Great British Success Story: An Invitation to the Nation to Invest in the Arts. The cover design consisted of ticket stubs for events, showing admission prices. No increase in annual grant resulted. It then took the centralising control-freakery of New Labour’s two culture ministry Tessas – Jowell and Blackstone – in 2001 to destroy the close relationships built up over decades with local government across England by sanctioning the Arts Council’s hostile takeover of the regional arts boards – the same boards that had taken on this role after the central body’s casual abandonment of regional arts events in 1956 and the inevitable ensuing bias towards metropolitan London.
Christopher Gordon
Winchester, Hampshire
