Special
pleading in the title? Perhaps. I have no reason to believe that the man so
many of us hope will be the next leader of the Labour Party spends much of his
time on Birtwistle and Lachenmann – or, for that matter, Schoenberg and
Stravinsky. He did, however, issue the
only statement of note on the arts during this leadership contest: a
glaring contrast with his rivals, who include Andy Burnham, one of the most
philistine Culture Secretaries – and the field is competitive – this country has
ever suffered. And any politician who mentions the heroic Birmingham Opera
Company, whose Mittwoch
remains one of the revelatory artistic experiences of my and many others’ lives,
has one sit up and take notice. Can you really imagine Yvette Cooper or Liz
Kendall being aware of the company’s existence, let alone what it did – and,
somehow, still does?
But
that is not really the point of what I wanted to say today. It struck me,
amidst the endless torrent of ‘unelectable’ calls from the far Right, whether
of the Labour or the Conservative Party, that there is a parallel here with
audiences for New Music. (I am old-fashioned enough still to use the capitals,
just as I might for ‘New Left’.) The bizarre, arrogant dismissal of so much of
this country’s population as beneath consideration – ‘the young never vote’, ‘the
majorities in favour of public control of utilities, the railways, etc. do not
count’, ‘the only people who matter are “aspirational hard-working families”
who will vote Conservative anyway’ – is not so dissimilar form the insistence
that concert and opera audiences want stale, boring formulae. Maybe some of
those who presently attend do; I should wager that those who do are likely to
have considerable overlap with the pensioners bribed by David Cameron, one of
the many actions which have done so much to disgust young voters and turn them
away from exercising their franchise. However, do things differently, consider
people, issues, repertoire that your existing ‘focus groups’ have probably
never considered – they might not even be hostile – and you will create a
larger, broader, richer audience and electorate. Many of the Royal Opera’s
stunning recent successes have been with new opera: The
Minotaur, Written
on Skin, or Quartett,
for example. They sold out – at reduced prices, yes, thereby guaranteeing that
no one was put off on grounds of cost.
Public
funding works and creates both audiences and social solidarity. We need more of
it, whether in healthcare, education, or the arts. Not, I think it is fair to
say, to invade more Middle Eastern countries and to squander on unusable,
irrelevant, and indeed morally obscene nuclear weapons. Ideally, we should
phase out admission charges altogether, just as, in one of New Labour’s few
laudable policies, they were scrapped for many of our great museums and
galleries. In the meantime, let us work on offering artistically worthwhile
experiences at affordable prices – we do much of this already, but should do
more – and expanding both electorate and audience. That would be an ‘aspiration’
worth trumpeting; if only New Labour and the Conservatives were able to think
in any terms other than the financial. Neo-liberalism is, finally, on the run.
We have not even begun to defeat it, but at least we are beginning to wake up
to what it has done and to what it has continued to do. Jezz we can! Just as that
great socialist Richard Wagner always wished.
