Culture, Economy and Politics

The Case of New Labour

David Hesmondhalgh, Kate Oakley, David Lee, Melissa Nisbett

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781349557776, 9781137426376
• eBook ISBN: 9781137426383
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Art General
• Index: Social Sciences

This book focuses on cultural policy in the UK between 1997 and 2010 under the Labour party (or 'New Labour', as it was temporarily rebranded). It is based on interviews with major figures and examines a range of policy areas including the arts, creative industries, copyright, film policy, heritage, urban regeneration and regional policy.

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Culture, Politics and Equality: The Challenge for Social Democracy

1.1 What we are trying to do in this book

This book seeks to advance understanding of cultural policy, public policy and politics. It pays particular attention to the way in which cultural policy responded to, and sought to shape, changing relations between culture and economy. It does so via a case study of cultural policies in the UK between 1997 and 2010.

This was a period in which the Labour Party formed three successive national governments. The term commonly used for these Labour administrations is ‘New Labour’, because that was how the party presented itself to the public and the electorate. This was never the official name of the party, but it has stuck. New Labour’s cultural policies are of particular interest, for at least two reasons. First, more than any other British government, and more than most modern national governments, New Labour placed great emphasis on culture and the arts in their political self-presentation and also to a certain degree in policy practice. Second, they did so by reconfiguring conventional understandings of cultural policy, by placing much greater stress on the economic role of commercial ‘creative industries’, while retaining and, indeed, raising subsidies for the arts.

We offer a sociological account which interprets, explains and evaluates cultural policy. We have conducted 45 interviews with many of the major players in UK cultural policy during the 1997–2010 period (including senior politicians and arts administrators), analysed many key documents and read a wide variety of secondary sources, academic, journalistic and others. We have used relevant social and political theory to interpret and evaluate what happened and what people told us.

This book isn’t designed just for UK readers, or for students of British politics or of British cultural policy.¹ New Labour’s cultural policies have been the object of considerable international attention (e.g., Flew, 2012; Prince, 2010a; Ross, 2009), as has New Labour’s distinctive brand of politics (see Giddens, 2001). We endeavour to explain references to UK institutions and figures to non-UK readers, and we assume only a very low level of familiarity with British politics and society. British cultural policy serves here as a case study of events and processes that we think might be of wider interest: for those concerned with cultural policy, we aim to show the benefits of understanding politics and public policy as a means of analysing government action in the realm of culture; for those interested in government and politics, we seek to provide a detailed sociological account of cultural policy as a specific domain of public policy.

Our goal is to bring together public policy, politics and cultural policy in a new and distinctive way that we hope might enhance understanding of these domains. In a nutshell, we want to bring more politics and ‘policy’ to cultural policy studies, and more ‘culture’ to public policy and politics research. The best analysis of public policy suggests the need for a multidisciplinary approach that considers the role of ideas, institutions and the way in which groups pursue their interests, and achieves a balance between the messiness and contingency of policy making and its links to power and ideology. Surprisingly, very few studies have provided adequate accounts of the distinctive dynamics of cultural policy as public policy.² Equally, we hope to offer something distinctive to researchers and students of politics and public policy by paying careful heed to questions of culture. Public policy and political science have been weak in their understandings of the difficult concept of culture – both its influence on and its shaping by government. They have shown almost no interest whatsoever in cultural policy.³ This both reflects and helps perpetuate cultural policy’s low status in government, when compared with domains such as the economy, welfare, health, education, security and constitutional matters. Some of these areas may seem more crucial, more bound up with matters of life and death. But culture matters a great deal, not only for the flourishing of societies and individuals, but also, increasingly, for the economic role it plays. New Labour recognised this – though in problematic ways.

It’s not just a matter of injecting some cultural studies into public policy, though.⁴ A claim underlying the following study is that contemporary cultural policy cannot be understood without properly conceptualising changing relations between economy, culture and society – and, just as crucially, without understanding competing interpretations of these changes. Paying attention to these issues may also be of benefit for understanding other domains of policy, including education, science and technology, social policy and environment. In fact, vital to our task of explanation and evaluation in this book is the obvious but surprisingly neglected insight that cultural policy involves complex relations between cultural policy itself and other areas of policy (and society) – including education, welfare, health and even foreign affairs.

While our aim is to produce a book that has more general significance, we also want to explain and evaluate our particular case – New Labour’s cultural policies. Bizarrely, the huge number of books and research papers on New Labour have paid almost no attention whatsoever to their policies on arts and culture.⁵ This probably reflects the lack of communication between cultural policy researchers and researchers of public policy more generally, as well as a sense among public policy researchers that the arts and culture are of marginal interest and importance – echoing the view of many politicians. So we are aiming to fill a gap, and to do so by considering the extent to which New Labour’s cultural policies successfully balanced various goals that a democratic cultural policy might pursue: greater equality of access to cultural production and consumption, higher quality of cultural goods, contributing to democratic vitality, enhancing the flourishing of individuals, communities and groups.

Here the question of political ideology is fundamental. Cynics are wrong to suggest that there is no difference in policy between the political projects associated with the various types of modern conservatism and social democracy. Of course, there are areas in which the two have somewhat converged, and there are ways in which both social democracy and conservatism have moved to the left on some issues (e.g., to incorporate a greater recognition of the rights of ethnic minorities) and to the right on others (e.g., the rise of neo-liberal thinking in the realm of economic and industrial policy). Political fields are constantly mutating, and the last 30 years have seen the rise in many countries across the world of ultra-conservative populist movements, the decline of left governmental projects (except in Latin America) and the uneven emergence of green politics. So one way in which we frame our own analysis of New Labour’s cultural policies is as an examination of the fate of cultural policy in an era when northern-world social democracy (and its Australasian equivalents) has had to reinvent itself in the face of neo-liberalism and conservative populism.

This book is not intended as a polemic against New Labour. Nor is it in any way a paean of praise to a government that is now remembered with little affection in the UK – as is, perhaps, the fate of most governments. Instead, we seek to capture the complexity of cultural policy and politics, to elucidate the ethical and political values of politicians, policy makers and commentators and to ask what they might have done better, taking into account the constraints they faced (or believed they faced) and the opportunities they had. Such scrutiny is surely an important part of any democratic debate.

In summary, then, this book seeks to draw upon, and contribute to, public policy studies, political studies and cultural policy studies. It does so by explaining and evaluating New Labour’s cultural policies as examples of a social democratic political project.

In the rest of this chapter, we provide the foundations for the analysis in the rest of the book. In Section 1.2, we analyse cultural policy as a distinct sector of public policy, delineating its main sub-sectors, and providing an outline of the main elements of cultural policy as it has generally been practised over the last 100 years or so: nation branding and cohesion, heritage preservation, the shaping of cultural production, distribution and consumption and regulation. We discuss the importance of understanding cultural policy in relation to other areas of public policy, including the tendency of cultural policy makers to make links or attachments to other, more prestigious or ‘heavyweight’ domains. In Section 1.3, in line with our comments above, we suggest a number of ways in which themes and issues in public policy research might help us better understand cultural policy, in particular regarding questions of power, influence and democracy. Because our view is that public policy cannot be understood without reference to political beliefs and values, in Section 1.4, we provide an overview of social democracy, and its efforts to reinvent itself in response to erosion of its traditional sources of support and the rise of neo-liberalism from the 1970s onwards. Section 1.5 then addresses social democracy’s relationship with culture, and with cultural policy, and we provide a brief account of the Labour Party’s record on culture and arts during its periods of government up to the 1970s. We then, in Section 1.6, identify the main distinctive themes of New Labour’s policies as a whole and introduce some of the controversies surrounding them, including whether they should be thought of as social democratic in any meaningful sense. Section 1.7 briefly discusses some of the main ways in which commentators and academics have evaluated New Labour’s record on arts and culture. Section 1.8 explains the structure of the rest of the book, and lays out the main research questions that it seeks to answer.

1.2 Cultural policy as a distinct form of public policy

The years after the Second World War saw the beginnings of what we would recognise today as cultural policy, in terms of its distinctive mixture of funding, regulation, protection and promotion (Gray, 2000: 35–54). Most European countries, however, draw on a much longer legacy of religious and aristocratic patronage, government censorship and control of media, and commercial culture embracing popular entertainment and high art. In the case of the UK, public funding for culture, in the sense of establishing national institutions, really began in the mid-eighteenth century, and institutions such as the British Museum and the British Library date from that time. The nineteenth century saw the great expansion of education, including in the arts and design (Bird, 2000; Frayling, 1987), as well as agonised parliamentary discussion about the UK’s loss of competiveness in manufacturing – a theme which in varying ways would echo throughout the next century. The Victorian era also witnessed the beginnings of what we might describe nowadays as urban cultural policy, with the growth of theatres and concert halls, art galleries and museums across British cities. As Hetherington (2014) points out, in the performing arts, theatres and concert halls were often commercially funded, while the development of museums, galleries and public libraries drew on philanthropic support, with some occasional state funding.

Thus, by the beginning of the twentieth century, what is sometimes described in a rather ungainly phrase as the cultural infrastructure of the nation – galleries, museums, libraries and concert halls – was widely developed. With the early twentieth-century surge in growth of the communications media and the cultural industries, ‘picture houses’ spread to almost every corner of the nation. What distinguished the post–Second World War period from earlier times was not only much greater amounts of public funding of culture, which allowed the arts to play a role in post-war reconstruction, but also the development of a series of rationales for state involvement in culture. Such rationales often carried within them echoes of earlier debates and ideologies: ideas about the civilising role of the high arts, and the economic benefits of aesthetic innovation (in the form of better design), for example. The post-war period would see these principles forming the basis of public policy, and the development of requisite institutions and agencies.

The complexities of cultural policy derive from tensions and contradictions between these different rationales, and the ways they are taken up or rejected by the key institutions. They also stem from the fact that cultural policy, like other forms of public policy, operates on a number of different scales. As one group of researchers puts it, ‘[c]ultural policy is now the province of all levels of government as well as supra-state bodies such as the European Union’ (Stevenson et al., 2010: 159). Cultural policies do not involve a simple top-down hierarchy whereby central government cascades its agendas ‘down’ to regional and local scales (though there are examples of this, as we shall see); some ideas emerge ‘below’ local government – as is, arguably, the case with the importance of urban regeneration in culture (see chapters 4 and 5).

As the brief history above indicates, cultural institutions themselves play a part in the cultural policy-making process, not least because they pre-date the development of national government policy on culture. What is sometimes referred to as the ‘arts establishment’ – referring to those who work in the subsidised cultural sectors – has over the last 20 or 30 years been joined by the large-scale commercial cultural industries as key actors in the cultural policy arena. We will see that an absolutely central theme in New Labour’s cultural policy – ‘the creative industries’ – derived from increasing activism on the part of lobbyists representing this commercially driven cultural sector.⁶

So, what do the state and other policy actors (see next section) do in the name of cultural policy?⁷ More than in other areas of public policy, it is difficult to summarise the core aim of cultural policy. Health policy, however complex in its execution, has the overall aim of better health (of which longevity, infant mortality, morbidity rates and so on are components). Defence policy is fundamentally concerned with defence of the realm. But, given the diversity of aims for cultural policy, it is difficult to say whether its core purpose is more culture, better culture, more diverse culture, culture that helps solve social problems or culture that makes more money. This uncertainty means that not only is cultural policy attached to other policy areas, it is also directly shaped by them.

Nonetheless, there are certain types of activities that are frequently carried out under the remit of ‘cultural policy’ and which are described below.

Nation branding or promotion. This refers to the role of culture in telling the national story, bringing the nation together, and is one of the most common activities with which cultural policy is involved. ‘Mega-events’, including, in the UK, those associated with royalty (coronations and assorted royal weddings, christenings and funerals), are a key form of national cultural display, running alongside the hosting of various travelling shows such as the Olympics, World Cup and Expo. The fierce competition to host so-called mega-events suggests the importance that national governments attach to this sort of self-promotion (García, 2004b). The building of major national cultural institutions – often called flagships – can also be seen as part of national self-promotion, as they were in the France of François Mitterrand (Looseley, 1995) as well as catalysts for urban regeneration via tourism and employment (see Chapter 4). Cultural ‘institutes’, such as the British Council, Alliance Française, Germany’s Goethe Institute and China’s Confucius Institute, also comprise key forms of national self-promotion (Paschalidis, 2009).

Protection of heritage and historical artefacts. Another aspect of cultural policy which many would see as part of its fundamental remit is the protection and promotion of national heritage or patrimony – often in the form of buildings or monuments (from stone circles to Gothic cathedrals) but increasingly in the form of intangible heritage: languages, customs, festivals, religious rites and so on can be classified as heritage, as can symbolically important non-cultural goods such as food.

Support for cultural production. In addition to protecting and preserving what the nation (or city, or community) already has, nearly all cultural policies assume some role for the state in supporting cultural production. The mechanism for this support may differ according to the societies’ overall orientation to cultural policy, and Chartrand and McCaughey’s (1989) four-fold typology of cultural policy approaches is useful here. In this typology, the USA exemplifies what they call a ‘facilitator state’ role, funding the arts via tax exemption or donation (often with matching funding as a lever); the UK is a ‘patron state’, devolving cultural policy implementation to so-called ‘arm’s-length’ bodies such as the Arts Council and the BBC; the ‘architect state’, such as France, uses state bureaucracy directly to fund culture production; authoritarian ‘engineer’ states such as China directly control artistic production. Such a typology is a little crude, and many states would use a mix of these approaches. But it is a useful way to consider the different ways in which states provide support for cultural production. Arguments over what counts as culture and therefore worthy of public support (is it just the fine arts, or does it include popular cultural activities such as TV, videogames and stand-up comedy?) constitute one of the key battlegrounds of cultural policy. In the UK approach, ‘arm’s length’ (quasi-independent) funding bodies such as the Arts Council fund the performing and visual arts and literature.⁸ Parts of both the film and television industries have been supported via pub...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures, Tables and Boxes
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Culture, Politics and Equality: The Challenge for Social Democracy
• 2. New Labour, Culture and Creativity
• 3. The Arts: Access, Excellence and Instrumentalism
• 4. What Was Creative Industries Policy? Film, Copyright and the Shift to Creative Economy
• 5. Cultural Policy and the Regions
• 6. Policy Innovation: Nesta and Creative Partnerships
• 7. Heritage
• 8. How Did New Labour Do on Arts and Culture? And What Happened Next?
• Appendix: People Interviewed for the Project
• References
• Index