A Quiet Week

I love working in August.  Your packed diary suddenly has wide open spaces with no meetings in sight.  Emails and telephone calls reduce to a trickle.  It’s a great month to catch up on those big tasks that require some time and focus.

The media usually calms down in August too.  Politicians are away on their holidays and news programmes are generally reduced to filling their allotted time with ‘silly season’ items.   But not this year.  Instead of writing up project evaluations with stories in the background of escaping pigs, shark sightings off the coast of Cornwall and the death of Britain’s best-loved carp, the soundtrack has been tales of rioting and looting on the streets of London, Birmingham, Manchester and many other urban centres.

Local Government guru Tony Travers summed up the situation very wisely on the BBC News channel: the violence has to be stopped, but eventually it will also have to be understood.  Something went seriously wrong in many of our communities during the last week.  With more massive cuts on the way to local services, we need to understand what are the underlying causes of this distinctly uncivil behaviour and how we can best address them in the short and long term.

It would highly inappropriate to threaten the first idiot who declares that the riots were a direct result of cuts to arts funding.  Clearly they are not.  But it is already evident that a lot of the ‘soft’ services that local government runs or supports that help build social capital and community cohesion (including the arts and culture) are the first in line for savings to meet the incredibly challenging cuts in funding from central government.

The London School of Economics Centre for Civil Society's defines the ‘Civil Society’ as ‘the arena of un-coerced collective action around shared interests, purposes and values.’  If the events of the last week don’t demonstrate a lack of shared interests, purposes and values, it is difficult to know what would.

We reported in Audiences News last week that the ONS has confirmed that people in the UK cite health, relationships, work and the environment as the most important determinants of their well-being.  No great surprise, I’d say.  But if you are growing up in an a family environment where some or all of these key foundations to a ‘happy’ life are missing, are you less likely to share collective ‘interests, purposes and values’ with the rest of ‘civil society’?  And don’t the results of the extremely detailed and robust work on Public Value in the arts show that it is not just the arts sector but also individuals and communities that recognise how the arts can bring people together, create links between communities & encouraging people to feel a sense of pride & belonging in their local area?

Arts and culture are not a silver bullet to heal the nation’s social ailments.  And let’s be honest, what we’ve seen on city streets in the last few days is very likely to have its roots in social issues that have been growing over years at a time when arts funding has never been more generous. 

As we move from addressing the symptoms to understanding the cause of the unrest on our streets, I believe the cultural sector needs to take an honest look at what it has been doing and what it could be doing differently to engage with all society.  I am not suggesting ‘dumbing down’ or an ‘instrumentalist’ approach, but we need to work more collectively and creatively to use high quality cultural experiences  to let everyone engage in an honest debate about what are the shared interests, purposes and values we believe are fundamental for our communities in the 21^st Century.

David Brownlee, Chief Executive, Audiences UK