Theatre - a Political Football?
I suppose it’s inevitable: we’ve just got a new Prime Minister so the opposition parties will grab any stick to beat him with they can find, and this week it’s been the turn of theatre to play that stick.
On Wednesday it was the Liberal Democrats, who sent out a press release telling us that:
The number of people from ethnic minorities visiting arts events has dropped by a quarter of a million since 2003, despite James Purnell’s recent claim that the battle for greater inclusion has been ‘won’.
Liberal Democrat research shows that the Department for Culture, Media and Sport has failed on virtually every one of its targets for greater inclusion in the arts.
And they tell us that Liberal Democrat Shadow Culture, Media and Sport Secretary Don Foster MP said, “A flawed and failed target system is not the way to involve wider sections of society in the arts. A well-funded arts sector would, at least, help. That is why Liberal Democrats oppose the raid of more than £500m - to fill the Olympic Budget black hole - on lottery funds supporting culture, arts and heritage.”
Then today the shadow culture minister Ed Vaizey has tabled a series of Parliamentary questions to newly appointed Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families Ed Balls, asking him to address the concerns raised by Stagecoach about the “seriously flawed” child licensing legislation, which we reported on 21st June.
I wish I could believe that these concerns arose from a sincere and deeply felt concern for the state of theatre but I can’t: I believe rather that they arose from a sincere and deeply felt need to beat the government with any convenient stick they can lay their hands on.
Both of these matters are of genuine concern to theatre. Target setting has caused major chaos everywhere it has been introduced - not just in theatre but in education and the NHS - and the way in which child licensing is treated is, as Ed Vaizey said, very much a “post code lottery”, and that is not good for the children who could miss out on the wonderful and enriching experience of appearing on the professional stage, but I worry that, if theatre is to be a political football, the only people to benefit will be the politicians.
I hope I’m wrong and that good will come of it, but when something becomes a political football, attutudes tend to become entrenched, reason and reasonableness fly out of the window and the real problems tend to get lost as insults are hurled across the floor of the House. So let’s not get too excited about theatre being brought into the political arena. Let’s wait and see what they do with it first.