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Dateline: 18th June, 2009
What We'll Do with the Arts With the opposition parties' continuing pressure on Prime Minister Gordon Brown to call an early General Election, the shadow arts minister Ed Vaizey has been laying out what a Tory government would do for the arts in a speech at the National Campaign for the Arts’ Future Britain Conference and interviews in The Guardian and The Stage. On the Arts Council he said, "I want to put on the record that the Tories are not going to abolish the arts council." He went on to say that he feels that the organisation's independence has been "eroded" in recent years. He added that his party would not follow the advice given by John Tusa's Conservative culture task force report in 2007, whcih suggested that the DCMS should directly fund the "big five", the country's largest arts organisations, such as the RSC, the National Theatre and the Royal Opera. He did say, however, that it "seems slightly absurd" for Arts Council to decide every three years if they are going to continue to fund these companies. "We'd like to see ACE identify those organisations where, realistically, we are never going to be in a position to say we are withdrawing funding," he told The Guardian. "We will identify those arts organisations and put in place a long-term funding agreement: we would say, 'You are a cornerstone arts organisation, your funding is guaranteed. Potentially ad infinitum'." He also said that, if the Conservatives came to power and he became arts minister, he would tell the Treasury, "Cuts to frontline arts organisations will have a profound impact on their ability to do their jobs. Within the overall framework of government spending, arts spending is a very small part. We're not going to save the economy by cutting the arts – but you could damage the arts by cutting the arts." He added, however, that he does believe that they will be able to find savings "within the bureaucracies that surround arts funding".
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