The Arts, Simon Jenkins and the slaughter of the provinces

Congratulations to Sir Simon Jenkins for winning the top gong at the Editorial Intelligence Comment Awards. This is a well-deserved prize for a journalist who seems to get angrier with every passing day. 
As if to prove the point, the swashbuckling journalistic knight used his Friday column in the Guardian to have an almighty tilt at the government, the Arts Council and the London cultural mafia about cuts to the arts announced in the Comprehensive Spending Review.
The piece is an exemplary piece of commentary; an exercise in raw fury.
Jenkins takes the London dinner-party elite to task for stitching up a deal that limits cuts to the Arts Council’s “regularly funded organisations” to 15 per cent, while demanding cuts of nearly 30 per cent elsewhere. He argues that this will lead to  “the mass slaughter of provincial arts”.
Although he is writing about culture, Jenkins has identified an uncomfortable consequence of the cuts for a government whcich talks the language of localism:
“Cameron may win plaudits for his generosity to London’s gilded elite, but he is penalising the provinces three times over: by cutting direct grants, by cutting grants to councils that might make up for the first cut, and by banning councils from levying extra taxes to compensate.