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On the morning of July 5, Keir Starmer and his supporters celebrated Labour’s election victory in the Turbine Hall of London’s Tate Modern, bathed in the glow of a huge red wall behind. Hard on the heels of the culture wars of the Conservative election campaign and its “rip-off degrees” rhetoric, this iconic start felt like stepping into a parallel universe.
Industry media such as the Art Newspaper and Artnet.com wasted no time in expressing their enthusiasm about what “Change begins now” could mean for the arts in Britain.
For me, watching Starmer making this speech in Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s power station turned iconic international art gallery, prompted a somewhat different question. Using this backdrop of the Turbine Hall’s industrial heritage seemed to ask: what will the arts do for everyday working people?
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Tate Modern generates £100 million annually for London’s economy. The transformation of the Bankside power station signals there’s life in the old dog Britain yet – that the arts can play a role in the creative renewal of the country by offering everyone more opportunities to appreciate great art.
In his book Culture Is Not An Industry, academic Justin O’Connor argues that art needs to be reclaimed for the common good, explaining how it is often presented in economic terms, focusing on its monetary value – rather than as an experience that enriches people’s lives. This narrow, economic definition of culture as consumption runs counter to Starmer’s “politics of service”.
My work draws on insights born of teaching young people from poor and working-class communities on creative degree courses, helping them to grasp the complex relationship between art and politics.
To put it briefly, the history of Europe is littered with revolutionary moments when politics had to reckon with art as a symbol of power and indifference to the needs of everyday people. The Louvre Museum in Paris and the National Gallery in London were both created to divorce the status of art from the aristocracy and the monarchy and transfer its power to the people. This history paints the Turbine Hall’s red wall in a more troubling light.
A party supporting arts for everyone?
The Labour party election campaign consistently stressed the working-class roots of its leader and many of its candidates. Arts Council England includes socio-economic background in its equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) metrics, but they are the exception rather than the rule among arts organisations.
In 2023, a team of academics from the Universities of Edinburgh, Manchester and Sheffield published an analysis of 50 years of data on jobs within the arts from the Office of National Statistics. This revealed that the opportunity for creative work is, and always has been, “profoundly unequal in class terms” and that “gender and ethnicity compound inequalities of access” to the arts.
Most startling of all was their finding that, compared to people who were working-class, from ethnic minorities or women, a person is still three times more likely to have a job in the creative industries if they are male, from an affluent background, live in London, yet don’t have a degree. It seems that the choice of a young, working-class Keir Starmer to become a lawyer was a more direct route to speaking at Tate Modern than art school.
Social-policy academic Teresa Crew has argued that to be working-class is to be seen as just not good enough. To fit in, working-class people must become what others deem to be “cultivated”, and that means abandoning heritage, behaviours and interests that do not fit with accepted, “higher” forms of culture.
Art appreciation is deeply biased because it always demands that people absorb culture that is situated elsewhere – meaning, on a global, not local level. In 2010, the Conservative party cemented the role of art appreciation in its knowledge-based national curriculum by placing particular emphasis on learning about the history of great artists and designers. Five years later, their election manifesto weaponised it, claiming the “irrelevance” of this focus on high art to the lives of normal people.
In effect, the Tories vociferously rejected their own curriculum to appeal to red wall voters. The strengthened eBaccalaureate pledged to “take back” education for “ordinary” working people by removing the arts from “your child’s statutory KS4 curriculum”, just as curbs on immigration would take back “your” country.
Populism has capitalised on years of deprivation and lack of opportunities in Britain’s coastal, post-industrial and rural communities, persuading people that their hardships are separate from issues of gender, sexuality and race.
But populism is wrong: low socio-economic status increases the impact of all forms of discrimination. The poverty that blights local communities across continents aren’t provincial problems but perpetuated by the drive for global profit.
In Barnsley, my home town, 30% of voters chose Reform in the election. In his novel Pity (2024), Andrew McMillan writes of this former mining area being home to numerous multinational call centres, attracted by the chance to offer low wages in an area ranked as the country’s lowest-paid district.
Art has the capacity to mine common ground between peoples and experiences and to reveal populism’s lies. But the arts can only foster greater social cohesion if the new government can help fix the discrimination built into creative education and the creative sector.
Without that change, any government support for the arts will undermine the government’s bid for political stability, and populism will mobilise the sector’s prejudice to chip away at the red wall that Labour has fought so hard to reclaim.
Vanessa Corby consults with CHEAD, The Council for Higher Education in Art and Design and is a member of the Labour Party
