Cultural Policy in the United Kingdom: The Collapse of Reason and the end of Tradition

Abstract

The most recent era of cultural policy in the UK has seen significant changes between the state, culture and the Arts. For many observers, moving into the 1990’s heralded the end of a golden age in state patronage of the arts and signalled the start of a new period of crisis and hardship for the arts, deprived of state funding and ignored by an increasingly ‘philistine’ public. This article attempts to shed light on the ‘discourse of the besieged’ by showing how this situation arose. The main approach is historical in nature and involves first an overview of government intervention in the Arts and a thorough assessment of their performance. This is followed by an attempt to unravel the thinking behind these state interventions in cultural policy, from which five main intellectual trends are uncovered to justify state policy in the Arts. It becomes apparent that the tradition of state sponsorship of the Arts has developed through the 19^th century but only gathered serious momentum after the Second World War. After 1945, the principles connected to the post-war recovery, the welfare state, the economic significance of the Arts, national prestige and Britain’s civilizing mission emerged to create a common concern for the arts in both political parties of the UK. The main conclusion in this history is that during the turbulent years of socio-economic change in eighties Britain, a great unravelling of this consensus occurred and the destruction of this tradition were witnessed. The arguments used throughout the 1945-1980 period had become unconvincing; large parts of the ideological constructions used to justify the state’s role in the Arts had been discredited. What is left is two opposing alternatives for future development; either the creation of a new, powerful theoretical justification for cultural policy or the total rejection of the very idea of a ‘cultural policy’ as outmoded, which entails leaving the fate of the Arts to the tender mercies of the market.