Jonathan Todd

Some might think that Andy Burnham tried to fuse incompatibles in socialism and culture in his address to the Fabian Society tonight. However, Tony Crosland produced some memorable lines on culture in one of the greatest socialist tracts that this country has ever produced.

“We need not only higher exports and old-age pensions, but more open-air cafes, brighter and gayer streets at night, later closing-hours for public houses, more local repertory theatres, better and more hospitable hoteliers and restaurateurs, brighter and cleaner eating-houses, more riverside cafes, more pleasure-gardens on the Battersea model, more murals and pictures in public places, better designs for furniture and pottery and women’s clothes, statues in the centre of new housing-estates, better-designed street-lamps and telephone kiosks, and so on ad infinitum. The enemy in all this will often be in unexpected guise; it is not only dark Satanic things and people that now bar the road to the new Jerusalem, but also, if not mainly, hygienic, respectable, virtuous things and people, lacking only in grace and gaiety”.

I say nothing of the extent to which Conservatives are “hygienic, respectable and virtuous”, or whether they have ”grace and gaiety”, but they are committed to a £20m cut in the budget for Burnham’s Department of Culture, Media and Sports (DCMS). While Burnham sees culture as an engine to economic and social progress, the Conservatives view it as something to be trimmed when public finances tighten. 

79 per cent of people think Liverpool is a city on the rise – the highest percentage of any UK city. Burnham citied this as evidence of the success of the city as European Capital of Culture in 2008. He wants to build upon this by creating a British City of Culture Prize.

Matthew Taylor provided a typically stimulating response to Burnham’s lecture and asked, in respect of the British City of Culture Prize, “how distinctive are our local cultural strategies?” It is to be hoped that they are if culture is to drive economic success in an era of globalisation as, I suspect, one of the ironies of globalisation is that far from enveloping all local cultures in some kind of homogenising global process of McDonaldisation, as globalisation’s detractors contend, it allows greater economic value to derive to the culturally distinct and locally particular.

“What defines the anti-globalisation radicals”, as Chris Patten argues, “is an extraordinary lack of faith in human beings. The movement of people from one country to another will apparently destroy national cohesion and integrity. Individuals will be ground down, along with their local identity, by an impersonal global capitalist machine”. A more optimistic view of human beings sees globalisation as partly being about a flowering of a more diverse range of choices and experiences becoming available to ever more people, which will be taken advantage of in positive ways. On this view, local cultural strategies maximise economic value by being as distinct as possible.

So let’s erect those statues in the centres of new housing estates, which Crosland called for, but let’s do so in a manner which builds genuine local cultural capital. Then, while Crosland, ironically, may have seen such statues as looking forward to a time when economic problems will be solved, they will make their best contribution towards weathering the stormy economic weather ahead.