Access AND Excellence: We Mean It Man

Thinking on Lisa Nandy's Jennie Lee Lecture

We Mean It Man (hat tip Jamie Reid)

Tl;dr: Jennie Lee’s 1965 White Paper was great and/but is now used as a shibboleth or password. Lisa Nandy’s inaugural Jennie Lee lecture is Good News But.

Jennie Lee, Totemic Queen of Cultural Policy

When I read Lisa Nandy’s inaugural Jennie Lee Lecture, in which she announced £270M of new-ish (very -ish in some cases) funding for arts and culture with much reference to her predecessor, Jennie Lee, the image at the top of this post popped into my head. I then made it using the broken-down set of references and connections that serves as my imagination and a Pritt Stick. For the young people in the audience, I think I’d best say something about this, without explaining it away entirely.

The picture – ok, let’s say it’s a work entitled We Mean It Man - references and recollages Jamie Ried’s sleeve for the Sex Pistols’ classic Silver Jubilee single God Save The Queen with a picture of Jennie Lee. Lee was, let’s not forget, a troublemaking firebrand socialist who would have struggled in a Starmer cabinet but has become as totemic to cultural policy folk as Queen Elizabeth II was to my Nan in 1977. Even the Tories quoted Lee when launching their Culture White Paper 10 years ago, as I explored when responding here. She was, no doubt about it, an inspirational figure and policy maker whose influence is arguably unmatched. Like the Queen in 1977, though, she has become the kind of shibboleth whose very trustworthiness should inspire a little caution about the uses to which her words are put.

I’ll spare you my exegesis of “God Save the Queen”, for now, to focus on last week’s lecture (and it is a lecture in all senses of the word, complete with a bit of finger-wagging and sit-up-straighting) and those announcements. I’ll also do some cross- rereading with Lee’s original White Paper, published 60 years ago today.

Good News But

Firstly and importantly, we should take some hope from the new investments. They acknowledge that the capital infrastructure of museums, theatres and other venues across the country has been plunged into peril by Austerity, and action is needed. Some strong arguments have clearly been made and won. This means they can be won again. Well done to anyone involved.

It’s good to see that sit alongside the clear thread around a new national story requiring local cultural facilities and access, and the emphasis on the movement from education to workforce requiring visible pathways and role models, which requires Arts Everywhere as the new Fund is called. How the Arts Everywhere Fund will work is a bit unclear as yet: it could prove to the start of a sea change, or more of a wrapper for a big box of Assorted Sticking Plasters. Time will tell. But put this next to recent good news from Scotland, and there’s some positivity.

We have to hope that the new money here is that start of something that includes revenue uplifts. (Jennie Lee increased her Arts Council’s revenue funding by 30% so they could better support regions and artists. #justsaying) It is crucial to invest in buildings, and the ideas that those buildings represent - I’m not of the school that sees buildings as somehow ‘not art’. But there is a strong leaning toward national institutions, and the main revenue funding is to the national museums and galleries.

I’m sure they need it, and more, but so do many others. I would echo the response from CLOA (Chief Cultural & Leisure Officers Association): “We are disappointed that the advice we have given to government and its arm’s length bodies about the need for strategic investment linked to local need and place-based prioritisation has not been heard. This settlement is a tactical sticking plaster rather than a clear strategic lead for how culture could and should be delivered to benefit everyone in our society.”

Much of the rhetoric, the moral exhortations to get on board with access to excellence, is little different, however, from the previous government or Lee’s White Paper. It’s not that I disagree with much of that – who’s going to argue for less local culture or less access for disadvantaged communities? Certainly not me. But what, I wonder, is there in here Ed Vaisey couldn’t or wouldn’t have said? (This may be hidden in the intriguing phrase [political content removed] in the transcript.) He’d probably even have made the same pointless digs about sponsor boycotts and being more like sports. (What, rugby?? Or cricket?? Someone introduce her to Freddie Flintoff, please.)

But there are significant omissions and elisions, I think, that make the moment more ambivalent.

Local and national

Jennie Lees 1965 White Paper is instructive in highlighting some of the areas the government need to go further and deeper. I’ll focus on two.

Firstly there is a regional dimension to bear in mind. (It’s useful to remember that culture is devolved to the parliaments and assemblies in Scotland, Wales and North Ireland, so Nandy’s purview is mainly England, and that Lee’s Arts Council was of Great Britain, not England.) Jennie Lee’s White paper accelerated the growth of regional arts associations, creating an arts funding system with a built in dynamic between national and regional which lasted for 25 years or so, through various restructuring.

Oddly, given it’s supposed to be important to this government, and to the future of funding all sorts of things, the word Devolution does not appear in Lisa Nandy’s speech. Nor are mayoral authorities or local government explicitly mentioned. What’s the vision for how local cultural development is invested in and generates growth (to use the government’s favourite word)? We need more of a vision for place development than good intentions. New funding models, new partnership models. This must come out from below the surface.

The inequalities within the cultural workforce often relate to place and the development of local economies and cultures, at least as much as they do to protected characteristics. These inequalities have deepened over the last 15 years and require more than Freeports and schemes to address them. To begin the next phase seriously increased revenue funding beyond London’s national museums and galleries is required. A couple of quotes from Jennie Lee are apposite but highly debatable here:

“If a sane balance of population between north and south, east and west, is to be achieved, this kind of development is just as essential as any movement of industry or provision of public utility service.”

“Of course no provincial centre can hope to rival the full wealth and diversity of London’s art treasures, but each can have something of its own that is supreme in some particular field.”

This cannot just be about building-based organisations, but also the agencies and development bodies, the capacity builders across the country. Just as everywhere needs museums and venues, it also needs promoters, cultural partnership delivery teams, FE/HE arts collaborations, place-based organisations, agencies employing artists and freelancers. Agency as in power and space to act.

Artists

Although Lisa Nandy does talk about artists and is very clear on the artistic rights and freedoms that governments must respect (in stark contrast to what’s happening in the USA), the announcements have little for individual artists and creatives. The comparison with Jennie Lee’s White Paper is telling. Here’s one typical quote from Lee: “Today’s artists need more financial help, particularly in the early years before they have become established. Their ability to develop and sustain a high level of artistic achievement lies at the centre of any national policy for the arts.” The model implicit in Lisa Nandy’s lecture is continued trickle-down.

The speech also marked the formal beginning of the new review of Arts Council England, chaired by Dame Margaret Hodge, the make-up of the Advisory Panel and a call for evidence. The word artist does not come up in the terms of reference. This is surprising given ACE’s current activities such as Developing Your Creative Practice, let alone what some expect of them. It may be they are seen as implicit in ‘people’, but that doesn’t seem encouraging. The make-up of the Advisory Panel gives me some confidence, it’s a good set of high support high challenge people so far as I can see, but they have a lot of exam questions to work through. I hope the interests of artists as well as organisations of all kinds come through.

Conclusion

Contrasting the lack of good news directly for artists and other freelancers in Nandy’s speech with that 1965 White Paper only highlights the lack of clear vision from the government as a whole since they regained power.

The emerging artists of 2025 face a far, far more structurally or systematically challenging situation – one development schemes and even additional funding will only scratch the surfaces of. The obstacles facing artists without family money and connections behind them are of a massively different order than those faced in 1965. The challenges facing our towns and cities are of an exponentially different order than 1965.

Then there may have the dead hand of rigid class structures, gender roles, what Lee described as “the drabness, uniformity and joylessness of much of the social furniture we have inherited from the industrial revolution”. Her policies came not much more than a decade after the end of all rationing, and as post-war rebuilding was still ongoing amongst the last of the rubble. But there was also free higher education (albeit for a far smaller proportion of people), and a comprehensive welfare state. Gone now. Many towns, cities, High Streets and neighbourhoods have also suffered the loss of industrial specialisms serving and employing local populations right across the UK, from mining to steel to chemical et al. Many places once again feel “drab, uniform and joyless”.

Lisa Nandy and her colleagues, and the national bodies who’ve no doubt influenced the investments announced with a lot of backstage work, have made the first positive steps in a long time. It feels an important moment, potentially. I don’t want to argue for Nothing But Perfection. But neither should artists, organisations and cultural leaders feel obliged to simply be grateful. It’s a moment for confidence and ambition, not gratitude.

Reliance on old frameworks has limitations when meeting new challenges, even if the aspirations look and sound similar. The comparison with Jennie Lee illustrates the lack of a powerful overarching wider social and economic framework from this Labour government, which has so far disappointed me on several fronts.

The root causes of the issues of 1965 are not those of today. How close to those root causes does an Arts Everywhere Fund get? A tiny voice in my head wonders if Lisa Nandy’s lecture is more attuned to the model of “Great Art for Everyone” than the potential of “Let’s Create”. This could make for interesting discussions with ACE as it renews its own frameworks post-review.

But finally I remind myself Lee’s White Paper was subtitled The First Steps, and that this was a lecture not a White Paper. Let’s hope the announcements behind it come to be seen as first steps. And let’s remember that’s not just down to the government.