The arts are affordable and profitable, costing as little to fund as half a pint of milk a week per person. The government would be idiotic to cut them.
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Whenever there's an economic squeeze, the arts are first to go. Ministers such as Nick Clegg and Jeremy Hunt may endorse the defence of the social, cultural, even moral value of the arts, but they cut them anyway. So inevitable do reductions seem, playwright Mark Ravenhill has even suggested the best place to start cutting.
If they're so inevitable, why bother writing those defences? Because this time it's different. This is the first time artists have had access to sound, well-evidenced arguments for the economic value of the arts. It's no longer in question: the arts are affordable and the arts are profitable. If the government is interested in saving money, it would be idiotic to cut them.
First, the annual cost of British arts subsidisation is £0.47bn – roughly 0.07% of public spending. That's 7p in every £100, which equates to 17p per person per week or less than half the cost of a pint of milk. Cutting the arts budget would therefore save next to nothing, especially as the cost of the arts vanishes when placed alongside other government spending. According to Mervyn King, the Bank of England governor, the size of the bank bailout is "breathtaking" at close to £1tn. Not many of us even realise how big a trillion is. A million seconds takes 11.5 days; a trillion takes 31,709 years ...
Of all the absurdities behind the potential cuts to the arts, the greatest is that they are directly, unequivocally profitable. In 2008, Arts Council England spent £100m on theatre; VAT receipts from London theatre alone were worth £75m. But hang on – everyone knows the arts lose money. How can they be profitable? Because Arts Council money is the thin end of a wedge prising open loads more investment. Every pound from the Arts Council buys several more – most of them directly contingent on that public subsidy. So the reality of a 25% cut from central government could result in something much, much worse, especially as arts organisations struggle to meet redundancy payments for staff they can ill afford to lose ...
So the arts are affordable, and the arts are profitable. Of course, the value of the arts can't be measured in pounds and pence alone – and yet they're earning their keep in pounds and pence alone. The Tories like financial strategising, so let's put it this way: cutting something that makes money is simply a poor business plan.
