I noticed this Tweet thread yesterday:
The creeping spread of fascism is apparent in every word of that.
Gary Lineker cannot express his personal opinions and, according to some, work for the BBC.
Now, artists are to be denied the right to express their opinions if they do not wish to prejudice the funding of organisations that might engage them. Think how that will silence some of our activist actors.
All fascists are terrified of the arts, and with good reason. It is now very clear that the fascists running the UK want to close down the right of those in the arts to speak freely.
The spread of authoritarian control in the UK is now becoming truly frightening.
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You can’t even be a member of a football club in the north east now if your non criminal opinions and actions away from the football ground challenge the inclusion orthodoxy. Put another way, if you want to take money from the arts, watch your mouth. And if you want to give money to sport or arts, watch your mouth. It’s dystopian and authoritarian rather than fascist imv.
Fascist – most certainly but this is also neoliberalism at work as well because it reeks of the sort of ‘de-politisation’ agenda that we’ve seen in BoE independence and austerity and the use of the ‘neutral expert’ who is not neutral at all.
Humour is also good. Charlie Chaplain and the Great Dictator is one example.
The Guardian today informs us that in school football tackling a player without getting the ball but bringing the other player down, while shouting “Brexit means Brexit”, is a thing.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/feb/14/brexit-tackle-politics-children-football
Weird….
some of the readers comments are very witty
Guardian pick =Surely the ‘Brexit Tackle’ would mean grabbing the ball , claiming you have a better ball , puncturing the ball , then running off because you never had another ball in the first place . Leaving everyone else stood in the middle of a field asking if anyone else has a ball they can play with.
Well, it made me laugh.
The experience of many decades of Communism in central and eastern Europe teaches us that the onus is on Arts Council.
The art continued to be created and artists continued to create. True, many of them were much poorer than necessary and also often persecuted and/or imprisoned (often with their entire families). But it didn’t stop the creation. Ever. Even during the hell of Gulags.
What it did though was to make the “official” (read censored and controlled) art dull and hence absolutely meaningless and irrelevant.
So, more totalitarianism Arts Council allow, less relevant the Art funded by them becomes. I am sure this goes directly against their charter (or whatever “mission statement document” they were founded with).
Arts Council, the decision is yours: Freedom and creation or irrelevance.
The disparity of reaction from right-wing governments between the extreme level of hatred, threats and manipulation that pours unchecked from Social media, newspapers and TV stations every day and the occasional mild opinion expressed by somebody working for a public body grows wider every day.
Even more worrying is the effect it is having on the UK population, creating a dangerously large potential for violence and tragedy.
In January 1940, during the Second World War, the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), was appointed to help promote and maintain British culture.
CEMA was government-funded and after the war was renamed the Arts Council of Great Britain. The council’s first chairman was John Maynard Keynes who used his influence in government to secure a high level of funding despite Britain’s poor finances following the war. Keynes used his political influence to ensure that the Arts Council reported directly to the Treasury rather than an arts minister or the education department as had been the case with CEMA, establishing the principle of an ‘arms length’ relationship between UK arts policy and the government of the day.
After Keynes’ death in April 1946 government funding was reduced.
As I have discovered several times in the last year, Keynes had many hands in many pies. Exactly how many may never been known. His intervention in saving Wittgenstein’s manuscripts can not be adequately comprehended. We are still living through it. And these ideas will be very important in the next 2 decades.
I have always said that those in power of any party are afraid of artists, because we ask questions, we hold a mirror up to those in power and shine a light on that which those in power want hidden. This is usually done in a visual way that makes people not only viewers but active participants. Those in power fear people believing they can actively make a difference.
As those in power wish to pretend we still live in a democracy, they cannot stop the artist, but they can stop the funding, encourage the neoliberal capitalists to negate the message by making the work a commodity to be bought and sold, without necessity to hold to account those that create the market.
Support the artists where you can, and always ask questions.
Thanks Richard
I wholeheartedly agree.
The whole purpose of art – any art – is to make you see things in a different way. That is the whole danger of it.
The new boy Lineker (copyright Mick Shannon) might not be able to express an opinion but Jeremy ‘Labour brought the country to it’s knees’ Vine can say what he wants.
I might be late with this question as you post was yesterday. Does anyone know if a record is being kept of all the changes such as this because like brexit, it’s of huge importance in the shift in balance. I’m old enough to remember when as a local authority employee we were prevented from putting a political poster in our homes during an election, that was introduced during the Thatcher years.
I don’t