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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Literary festivals are closing the book on their partnerships with Baillie Gifford. The Scottish fund manager is under attack for its purported links to Israel and the fossil fuel industry. The move may appease activists but is yet another blow for Britain’s beleaguered arts sector.
The Edinburgh International Book Festival, which this week followed Hay Festival, will now be among a huge cast of cultural offerings struggling for funds. Corporate donations are a shallow pool in the UK in any case, along with philanthropic largesse. State funding, meanwhile, is retreating faster than a bear exiting stage left.
Money from Arts Council England, which distributes national state funding, fell by nearly a tenth in real terms in the decade to 2020/2021, according to the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre.
Funding from local authorities, the biggest chunk of income, has almost halved on the same basis, according to Campaign for the Arts. The parlous state of council balance sheets points to continuing declines: bread (or care home beds) comes before circuses.
An exasperated Dominic Cook, a former director at the Royal Court theatre, last month went so far as to call for renationalising the arts. His point, provocatively framed, was that the current system is broken. The model that worked when he started out in the late 1980s — when generous state funding and box office receipts combined to more or less cover costs — now requires hefty supplemental doses of private funding.
Baillie Gifford’s exit illustrates just how tough that is. UK philanthropists are in any case a pale shadow of their US cousins and fundraising already devours too much of creatives’ time.
Efforts to boost the former, such as a 2010 government pledge to match philanthropic donations to arts organisations with public money, barely moved the dial. Shrinking public money hardly serves as a magnet for private inflows. That is especially the case outside of well-heeled parts of London or Edinburgh. It is easier to woo tycoons to support shows in Chelsea than Wigan.
British arts are largely a cottage industry, with star-studded West End shows and a fiendishly long tail. Inefficiencies are inherent but cost-cutting is hardly viable if you are a two-woman band. Besides, size or cultural heft are not signifiers of financial success: London’s National Theatre and Young Vic both ran deficits last year.
Finding a suitable financing model is tough. There is no getting away from a hybrid public/private model but predictability would help. Knowing how much money is coming through from the state, via government or lottery funding, each year is crucial. Knowing that the local authority-owned building is not at risk of being sold under your feet is also key. Consistent policy and, ideally, far fewer than the 12 culture secretaries that have held the post in the past 14 years would help.
The UK is one of just three countries that is a net exporter of music. Music, performing and visual arts still employ 280,000-plus people, although this is down from 315,000 in 2019. Book festivals, theatre and concerts woo tourists. The case for rethinking funding just got stronger.
