The problem with Kneecap – and the arts blob

When I was about 14 or 15, someone sent me a birthday card with the words: ‘Teenagers – tired of being harassed by your stupid parents? Act now! Move out, get a job, pay your own bills, while you still know everything.’ I don’t think it was personal, not least because I was fairly strait-laced, and I enjoyed the joke. I have never had much time for the idea of the teenager as heroic nonconformist, engaged in idealistic rebellion against the stultifying bourgeois conformity of suburbia. Even when I was in my teens – an alarmingly long time ago now – I found it all a bit self-aggrandising.

That birthday card came irresistibly to mind when I read that the Northern Irish rappers Kneecap were suing HM Government, after Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch vetoed a government grant of £15,000 which the group had been awarded. You may be surprised to hear that Belfast has a hip hop scene; personally, I was more surprised to hear of the current government actually showing some backbone.

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Kneecap, as you might imagine from the name, have an aesthetic which is explicitly modelled on physical force republicanism. Publicity shots show them wearing balaclavas in the colour of the Irish tricolour and they regularly chant ‘Brits Out!’ at their live shows (the British army left Ulster more than a decade and a half ago). And yet, curiously, they have no compunction in coming cap in hand to the despised Westminster government, like a teenager who hates his reactionary parents for their middle-class hypocrisy, but still wants a lift to the cinema and a new smartphone.

It is perhaps worth noting that £15,000 is equivalent to about three times the median annual income tax bill for a British household. One would imagine that most taxpayers would rather their hard-earned money was spent on something a little more useful than resurrecting the iconography of one of the most savage terrorist groups in modern history. Quite likely the courts will rule against the government on the grounds that some form was not filled in properly, or that the reason given for refusing the money was inadequate – the new elite idolise ‘Process’.

All the same, it does give us a little glimpse of what a more organised and serious conservative government could do to limit access to public funds for organisations and movements that are explicitly political, and explicitly anti-conservative. There is obviously a strong case for some public subsidy of the arts, particularly of high culture. The value of ballet companies, orchestras, theatre and opera houses to the continuity of our civilisation is such that we cannot simply ‘let the market decide’. But there must be a kind of implicit understanding with such arrangements that public money brings with it certain responsibilities – not to be completely apolitical, or to avoid all difficult subjects, but at the very least to avoid mere agitprop. It goes without saying, of course, that the government should have the power to stop public funds from going to groups, like Kneecap, who make no secret of their disdain for the country and openly identify with its enemies in their public postures.   

This kind of argument is often construed as the wicked philistine Tories attempting to tie the hands of their critics. However, the point is not that no theatre company or local arts group must ever criticise conservative ideas or aspirations. No one believes that. What we do argue is that artistic merit and genuine insight must always be paramount, and that a play or song or event does not attain merit and insight simply by virtue of being anti-conservative. There is simply no reason, for example, that local councils should be funding drag queen story hours – that bizarrely sinister US import – or that Arts Council England should subsidise a performance called The Family Sex Show.

The Tories have failed to exercise any real control over the arts blob. They have not appointed reliable people to key positions, they have not attached strict conditions to funding, they have not developed a distinctive strategy for using the arts to their advantage, as the left have done so effectively for so long. This is true of the international as well as the domestic spheres. We hear a lot about soft power, but most British cinema – much of which is supported by public funds one way and another – fails to capitalise on the more traditional aspects of British culture which are really popular and well-known in lucrative overseas media markets like the Far East and North America.

Kemi Badenoch, whose department must now deal with the Kneecap legal action, is often talked of as a future Tory leader. Seeing off the Belfast rappers might teach her some useful lessons about what the right must do to win in the cultural sphere.