From the start, the combatively worded motion — ‘Time for the arts to stand on its own two feet and stop sponging off the tax-payer’ — came under attack in the Spectator arts debate at Church House last month.
From the start, the combatively worded motion — ‘Time for the arts to stand on its own two feet and stop sponging off the tax-payer’ — came under attack in the Spectator arts debate at Church House last month. Speaking for the motion were Nigel Farage MEP, Tiffany Jenkins and Marc Sidwell; against were Ben Bradshaw MP, Matthew Taylor and the Culture Secretary Ed Vaizey, who called it ‘brutal, vulgar, left-wing, and hostile to excellence and quality’. The arts doesn’t sponge off the taxpayer, he said, it’s the other way around. The subsidy supports the burgeoning tourism market. He revealed that the independent arts sector welcomes state-funded art and regards it as a research and development department. He defended free entrance to museums: ‘Imagine a Peruvian visitor who comes to the British Museum to see some of his national treasures. He reaches the café, with an extra £20 in his pocket because he got in for nothing, and he spends it on carrot cake and lapsang souchong. This is how it works. We fleece him at the café, not at the entrance.’
Nigel Farage celebrated the wording of the motion. ‘Clear, robust and unequivocal, it looks like a Ukip amendment in the European Parliament.’ He told us government rarely does things better than people. And he diagnosed the Arts Council with a disease that afflicts all public bodies. ‘It does its best to grow.’ The only beneficiaries of subsidised art were the administrators while the ‘poor ordinary taxpayers’ were forced to buy subsidised fun for the rich.
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