The rays of the sun vanquish the night! The golden Labour morning has finally broken and in the classical music world, they’re celebrating like Sarastro’s disciples at the end of Die Zauberflöte. Lovely flute-playing Sir Keir is the piper at the gates of dawn and any minute now the money sluices will open once more. If anyone’s noticed that this particular sunrise seems a touch greyer, and a lot more drizzly than the fondly-remembered Year Zero of 1997…well, they need more faith. This is the arts sector: we’re all about speaking truth to power. And the truth — clearly — is that now our lot is back in charge everything’s going to be wonderful. 

“Our country is experiencing a moment of generational political transformation,” declared Sir Nicholas Serota, chairman of Arts Council England, in the Observer last weekend. “Britain needs a cultural reboot” read the headline and it’s clear that Sir Nicholas, for one, welcomes our new overlords. He’s “inspired by the new government’s mission-led approach”; he acknowledges “learnings from Labour’s Sure Start policy”. And off he trundles: 1300 words of stilted obeisance to the new order disguised as a lukewarm shower of fluent wonk-speak.

True, much of it sounds reasonable, and would doubtless already be happening if it wasn’t for the black-hearted Tories and — er — the small matter of money. Arts for the under-fives. Clearer career paths for young artists. A new school curriculum, and art events in all those new housing developments that will now, assuredly, start mushrooming across the land. Admirable aspirations; so normal these days that we no longer question the basic premise behind all this earnest social imagineering.

It’s simply accepted that the subsidised arts should be doing this stuff at all — that their role is to act as an arm of the state, patching up policy failures in social care, education and even (it now appears) housing, rather than doing the one thing that artists are unarguably good at: making art. There’s your Blair era 2.0 right there — an ideology that took root after 1997, sank deep into the collective mentality of a subsidy-dependent sector, and was lazily tolerated during 14 years of a barely-conservative Conservative government. If you receive official money, you are obliged to implement official policy.

Like any Faustian pact, it looked positive on the surface — most artists genuinely want their work to make a mark on the world. It really did seem hopeful at first, and if anyone in the classical music world was apprehensive about swapping John Major, a prime minister who revered Dame Joan Sutherland, for one who preferred to party with the Gallagher brothers, they didn’t say. Any more than they wondered — out loud, at least — whether public art subsidy really should be a transaction, rather than a creative liberation. 

I was a junior orchestra manager back then, and occasionally during the noughties, alarm bells would ring. An Arts Council official suggested that orchestras should play 50 per cent contemporary music or have their subsidy cut. An ACE music officer listened to our mustard-keen, gloriously diverse youth orchestra performing the socks off The Firebird, and buttonholed me afterwards: “I notice you have an Indian cellist. Shouldn’t he be playing music that’s relevant to him?” The kid had just given up his school holiday for the chance to play Stravinsky under Sakari Oramo. That, it seemed, did not tick the right box.  

But overall we still believed that the Arts Council was, at root, the Keynesian champion of excellence for all that its postwar creators had envisaged — and that intelligent heads would prevail. Since then, the miasma of bad ideas has gradually risen to the top of the organisation, unchecked by successive New Labour and Tory arts ministers, and in all probability about to be supercharged by Starmer’s lot. Sir Nicholas appears to have been overcome by the fumes. People who know him tell me he’s a decent, cultured sort, but his organisation has been wholly subsumed in the Blob. 

There’s something profoundly cynical in the way ACE used the last government’s ineptitude as cover for its own anti-classical agenda: its cack-handed assault on English National Opera, and its slashing of touring companies to the point where several major UK cities now have no regular live opera. Tories made us do it, and ran away! The cognitive dissonance at the end of Serota’s article is ear-splitting. “We must incentivise domestic touring” he says — barely eighteen months after his organisation took a chainsaw to an operatic touring ecology that took decades of cultivation. There’s a quick potshot at the arts media: stop criticising, or we won’t be answerable for the consequences. 

No private sponsor (in the UK at least) has ever wielded such coercive clout

And finally, a rallying cry: “To artists: continue to be as brave and challenging and uncompromising as you have always been. Stand by your choices, stand by your art, and know that we will stand by you.” In March, Welsh National Opera — whose subsidy comes partially from ACE — published a protest against funding cuts, signed by the company’s music director Tomas Hanus and artists including Bryn Terfel and Judith Weir. ACE’s response — revealed by a Freedom of Information request from the journalist Hugh Morris of VAN Magazine — was chilling. If such insolence persists, it warned, “we would have to review the £3.2 million Transform grant”. It couldn’t be clearer: toe the line or get the chop. When ACE stands by its artists, it seems, it’s in order to hold a revolver to their head. 

That’s not entirely new: ACE has long had the power to extinguish major companies at will (remember Kent Opera? The D’Oyly Carte?). When I worked in classical music, the renewal (or otherwise) of an organisation’s National Portfolio status was a three-yearly moment of existential dread. I sat up late trying to calculate how many months we could survive before losing our home if (as had been hinted) the axe fell on our orchestra. No private sponsor (in the UK at least) has ever wielded such coercive clout. 

… it’s a terrifyingly capricious partner, and largely unaccountable

But sponsors do not grow on trees, especially outside of London, and for most large-scale arts organisations the level of support supplied by ACE cannot easily be replaced. Meanwhile, it’s a terrifyingly capricious partner, and largely unaccountable. Tory governments don’t care enough to intervene; Labour…well, we’re about to find out, but do you think people who five years ago campaigned to put Jeremy Corbyn in No.10 are likely to endorse excellence for its own sake? 

In truth, it shouldn’t be up to any government. The arm’s-length principle is one aspect of the Arts Council that needs to be inviolable (and in fairness, Serota does acknowledge this). Real independence, rather than a toxic compromise with power, should be the bedrock of the factory reset (we’re far beyond a mere reboot) that ACE so clearly requires. Dream on. Meanwhile, arts organisations will just have to carry on dancing in the rain. They’ve had plenty of practice, after all.