Labour leadership frontrunner backs music and the arts

Labour leadership favourite Jeremy Corbyn has pledged that his Government would undo the damage caused to music and the arts by Conservative funding cuts, with a programme of reinvestment.

National funding for music education hubs declined from £82.5m in 2010-11 to £58m in 2014-15, a drop of more than £24.5m, as part of the Conservative government’s programme of cuts.

A campaign to halt the cuts – Protect Music Education – headed by the Incorporated Society of Musicians (ISM) in partnership with 134 organisations from all corners of the music education and music industry sectors, managed to successfully persuade the Department for Education to increase funding by dedicating £75m support for music education hubs in 2015/16. This represented an increase of £17m from 2014/15 when hubs received just £58m, but still represented a drop from the 2010 figure.

Under a Corbyn-lead Labour Government, music would be at the heart of a set of policies in which he has pledged to:

• Invest in the arts to “rebuild the foundations of artistic enterprise”

• Encourage every child to learn a musical instrument or act on stage

• Widen access to the arts

• Direct a greater proportion of funding to local projects

• Create more outreach programmes for young people from flagship national projects

• Protect the BBC from further cuts

He outlined his vision for improving the nation’s cultural wealth, saying: “The arts and creative industries are the backbone of much of our cultural heritage, and I fear that under this government over the next five years this cultural heritage is under threat. As a proud supporter of the arts and firm believer in the community benefit of publicly-supported arts policy, I would like to set out where I stand with regards to the creative industries and my priorities, if elected Labour leader, in defending and supporting British local and national arts projects.

“Under the guise of a politically motivated austerity programme, this government has savaged arts funding with projects increasingly required to justify their artistic and social contributions in the narrow, ruthlessly instrumentalist approach of the Thatcher governments. During the 1980s, Thatcher sought to disempower the arts community, attempting to silence the provocative in favour of the populist.

“The current climate of Treasury value measurement methodologies (taken from practises used in the property market and elsewhere) to try to find mechanisms appropriate to calculating the value of visiting art galleries or the opera are a dangerous retreat into a callous commercialisation of every sphere of our lives.

“The result has been a devastating £82million in cuts to the arts council budget over the last 5 years and the closure of the great majority of currently funded arts organisations, especially outside London. Even if some London flagships survive, they will be unable to continue the participatory projects of such benefit to our local communities.

“The arts must never be the preserve of those with privilege but open to all. Access and diversity within the arts must be improved with greater equalisation of those who are able to benefit from public funding as well a more even regional allocation of funding.”