r/ukpolitics • u/Bibemus Uber-Woke Net-Zeroist Rejoinerist • 15h ago
Culture needs a champion. Will Andy Burnham step up?
https://www.ft.com/content/b7c6e951-2ba3-4022-a5b5-648da2bfcd26•
u/Abject-Cod5144 10h ago
I think one of the saddest things these days is how hard it is for new voices from working class or marginalised backgrounds to break into the arts these days.
Just look at the BBC still giving Moffat new tv projects after a string of clunkers.
AI's only gonna make it worse.
And like, art and music and culture are so wonderfully and fundementally human, they should be something we all should get to share. Doesnt matter what wing you're on. Art shoupd be for all.
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u/ProjectLeeds 15h ago
By culture, the Westminster journalists will of course just imagine the galleries and museums in London
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u/Bibemus Uber-Woke Net-Zeroist Rejoinerist 15h ago
Culture needs a champion. Will Andy Burnham step up?
After years of funding cuts, shifting arts strategies and pressures on the UK economy, the industry is seeking a fresh start from the prime minister
Charlotte Burns
When Andy Burnham stood up to make his first speech at a Labour Party conference as prime minister, he laid out an ambitious agenda for reshaping Britain, from housing to social care, Europe to electoral reform. But there was one thing he notably failed to mention: the arts.
Burnham is the only UK prime minister to have also served as secretary of state for culture, media and sport. He championed the central importance of culture in the aftermath of the global economic crisis. “Rather than sitting on the fringes,” he said, “culture, sport and the creative industries are part of the core script for recovery and future prosperity.” He is also the only British prime minister known to have moonlighted as a DJ.
Alan Davey started as chief executive of the Arts Council on the same day Burnham became culture secretary in 2008. “For him to be a prime minister who cares about culture, all the ingredients are there,” he tells me. “His talk is about growth in all postcodes — and one of the ways you bring growth is through cultural activities and the creative industries.” Culture is badly in need of a champion after years of funding freefall. Spending per person by Arts Council England and local authorities between 2009-10 and 2022-23 fell by 18 per cent and 48 per cent respectively. Nesta, an innovation agency originally established in 1998 with a £250mn National Lottery endowment to support science, technology and the arts, has now stopped funding the arts. The scrapping of non-dom status in the 2024 Budget has led to a flight of capital that, cultural leaders say, has disproportionately hit philanthropic donations. Brexit has also caused real damage, from the art market to art schools.
Back at Whitehall, culture’s position is in danger of being sidelined. Until July it was a central focus of a department of 1,156 civil servants. Now, with the department for culture’s expansion to include digital, more than 2,600 staff are expected to move from the former Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, dwarfing the original team. Insiders say the expanded portfolio means culture secretary Lisa Nandy is likely to focus on broader cultural issues such as the future of the BBC, opportunities for young people and challenges posed by AI.
One key test of the government’s position will be how it implements Baroness Margaret Hodge’s December 2025 review of Arts Council England, the national development agency that administers funds to artists, arts organisations, museums and libraries from the National Lottery and the government.
Hodge called for the organisation and its arm’s-length relationship with the government to be upheld, while urging an overhaul of its strategy and funding model. Already Arts Council England has abandoned Let’s Create, its flagship 10-year strategy launched in 2020, after the Hodge report noted that “its implementation stifled creativity and innovation”.
Hodge proposed more autonomy, suggesting longer-term institutional support, grants for individual artists and the removal of the bureaucracy that burdens arts organisations. Her proposals to give more decision-making power to regional boards and better tax incentives for philanthropists outside London could also align with Burnham’s devolution agenda.
But devolution also places the onus on the culture sector to reimagine itself, says John McGrath, artistic director and chief executive of Factory International, which runs Manchester’s Aviva Studios and the Manchester International Festival. For national museums, this calls for “a completely different relationship to working across the country that’s based on trust of other organisations”.
Ringfencing a portion of the new “tourist tax” — announced last month, giving local leaders the ability to charge overnight visitors — for culture will be critical, says Laura Pye, director of National Museums Liverpool. “Devolution can only really work if you put more new money into the system. We can all move money around — that’s completely pointless. But the tourist tax does do that in a way that is more effective than other things I’ve seen put forward.”
A specific arts strategy will now largely fall to Baroness Ruth Mackenzie. Formerly a department for culture adviser to Burnham, Mackenzie went on to direct the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad before serving as director of arts at the British Council. Her brief as parliamentary under-secretary of state now includes libraries, museums and cultural property, sponsorship — and crucially, Arts Council England policy. “We’re all supporting Ruth because hers will be a clear, strong voice,” says V&A Museum director Tristram Hunt. “It’s a world she understands and is very supportive of, in London but also, crucially, outside London.”
While a strategy has yet to be laid out — requests for comment from the prime minister, his chief of staff, the culture secretary and the arts minister were declined — there are signs emerging. The only cultural policy announced at the party conference was upholding free admission at national museums, continuing a landmark Labour policy. The news ended months of speculation that foreign visitors would be charged an admission levy, which the sector was against.
The announcement did not detail how the government will fund free admission but did quietly note that it will “develop a long-term strategic plan for the future of museums”. The last major review came in 2017, by Conservative peer Lord Neil Mendoza. His chief focus, in light of declining government spending, was a more strategic approach to resources, including better use of lottery funding.
Established in 1994 to supplement rather than replace government spending, National Lottery funding has become increasingly essential to many institutions. Mendoza’s 2017 review found that, as government support fell, the lottery’s heritage fund more than doubled its average annual awards to museums, from £56mn between 2007 and 2012, to £126mn between 2012 and 2017. These figures are separate from Arts Council England’s lottery funding, which accounted for £263mn, or almost a third of the organisation’s total budget in its most recent accounts.
Now, the Cultural Policy Unit, a think-tank, is proposing a 10-year rebalancing of the National Lottery Distribution Fund. “What we are suggesting is a time-limited switch in order to remake Britain,” says director Alison Cole. One idea is to temporarily redirect 10 per cent from the Community Fund, which currently receives 40 per cent of lottery proceeds to support charities and community projects (arts, heritage and sports receive 20 per cent each), to funnel an additional £135mn a year into arts and heritage for urgent cultural renewal.
Another approach, with the aim of attracting new money into the sector, would be to use lottery funds to create a public/private endowment, says John Newbigin, co-founder of arts development organisation Creative England (now Creative UK), who worked alongside the prime minister at the department for culture. “You give something a rocket-assisted launch with public money, then encourage philanthropy and citizens to get involved,” Newbigin says. Hodge’s report suggests the creation of a £250mn endowment fund structured to attract philanthropic giving “with [Arts Council England] raising £1 for every £1 they receive through the endowment”.
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u/Bibemus Uber-Woke Net-Zeroist Rejoinerist 15h ago
Culture is high on the agendas of other, notably rightwing, western governments. In the US, Donald Trump has appointed himself chair of Washington arts venue the Kennedy Center, signed an executive order entitled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” to overhaul the Smithsonian Institution, and is planning a sculptural “National Garden of American Heroes”. In Germany, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party has put the arts at the centre of its plans. Using language harking back to the Nazi era, it says state funding should support art celebrating “Volk, Freiheit und Nation” (the people, freedom and nation).
In the past both Burnham and his chief of staff James Purnell, who preceded Burnham as culture secretary, have championed culture as a means of influence. Purnell warned in 2024 that the creative industries must not be treated “as an afterthought” in a report calling for a more strategic approach to Britain’s creative industries and soft power.
One of the report’s central proposals was for the creation of a Soft Power Council chaired by the foreign secretary. Now, in an era of increasing realpolitik, the council has become “a lame duck”, says one interviewee. One of the 26 council members says it has lost momentum after David Lammy was reshuffled out of the foreign office. Designed to meet four times annually, the group has met just five times since launch in January 2025. The most recent meeting minutes from October 2025 begin with apologies for the no-show of the two co-chairs, the foreign secretary and culture secretary.
Another council member points out that Burnham’s is “a much more consciously domestically focused government [than Sir Keir Starmer’s] . . . Labour MPs have brought Andy in to ensure that they hold their seats against Reform. The priority is UK bread-and-butter, standard-of-living issues.”
This may mean making the case for culture as part of the fabric of civic society, as Burnham did while mayor of Greater Manchester. Factory International’s McGrath says the success of Manchester is the result of 30 years of strategy. He points to Sir Richard Leese, the Labour leader of Manchester city council between 1996 and 2021. Together with the council’s late chief executive, Sir Howard Bernstein, Leese made culture, sport and commerce the triple engines driving Manchester’s sustained growth and regeneration after the 1996 IRA bombing of the city centre. It was Leese who asked: “Who wants to live in a city without culture? The answer is nobody.”
For many people in the UK, this is already an unfortunate reality. Burnham is in the rare position of knowing the sector from the inside and having a team around him with strong cultural experience. The question is whether his own vision will emerge.
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u/andreirublov1 8h ago
Will he fuck. I'm happy we have our first PM with a northern accent, but still he's a Manc lad and - for better or worse - culture to him means TOTP and MOTD
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