Museum piece

What are museums for? I wish I’d never asked the question but I did once unfortunately in a Douglas-Home-Memorial-Prize-winning essay which caused a bit of a stink in the increasingly PC museums and galleries sector, and which I’m now going to have to justify in a debate starting at 6pm tonight at Merseyside Maritime Museum in Liverpool.

I’ve been invited, I fear, to be the evil elitist posho in the suit who everybody hates. I’ll be cast by people like Liverpool Museums’ infamous director David Fleming (who’s very good at that kind of thing) as a member of the forces of reactionary darkness who would seek to deny our cultural heritage to starving kiddies and the disabled and the unemployed and ethnic minorities, so that snooty, university educated types like me can keep it all to ourselves.

What I actually believe is that museums should stick to what they’re good at and stop allowing themselves to be used as instruments of social policy.