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