Culture Must Be Defunded

This is an 'author's cut' of the second section of 'Defund Culture', which appeared in the Spring 2022 issue of the journal Radical Philosophy. The first section, titled 'The Culture War and the Attack on the Arts', is available here.)

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Understandably, the response of many of those on the left and liberals alike has been to argue against those making such decisions that culture should be publicly funded, and to an increasing extent, not least because Britain’s creative industries are such a success economically and in terms of soft power. The government’s own data shows they contribute £111bn to the economy and are second in this respect only to the country’s financial services. (Clearly, they’re being attacked for reasons other than money.) This has led to initiatives such as The Public Campaign for the Arts. Established in 2020 ‘to protect U.K. culture from the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic’ and now the nation’s biggest arts advocacy organisation, their ‘mission is to champion the value of the arts and creativity in the UK’.

However, while my collaborators and I would strongly refute the Government’s depiction of culture, and of universities, as not being worthy of substantial financial support, it’s also fair to say this left-liberal argument is aiming at the wrong target. For us, part of the point of universities, and the arts and humanities especially, is not so much to act as guardians of tradition as to provide spaces where society’s accepted, taken-for-granted beliefs can be examined and interrogated. Keeping this interrogation of common-sense certainties in mind, perhaps we can see the defunding of culture – somewhat counter-intuitively – not just as threat but also as an opportunity: one that gives us a chance to argue for transformative change by asking whose – or indeed what – culture it is exactly that we want to be funded?

In my 2021 book, A Stubborn Fury, I wrote about how 39% of the UK’s leading people are privately educated (that’s more than five times as many as in the general population), with nearly a quarter graduating from Oxford or Cambridge. It’s these predominantly upper- and middle-class individuals who receive most of the financial support for education in the UK. Approximately £3 is spent on students in private schools for every £1 that is spent on pupils in the state system. The majority of this money is channelled to London and the south-east of England, where there are 3.8 and 3.6 private schools per 10,000 pupils respectively, compared to just 1.2 in the north-east.

The upper and middle class also receive the largest proportion of the available support when it comes to the creative arts. It was found in 2017 that half of the country’s poets and novelists attended private school and 44% were educated at Oxbridge. Yet just 7% of the UK population go to private school and approximately 1% graduate from Oxford or Cambridge. Clearly, not everybody has the same opportunity to contribute to the arts and culture. If you want to be a published literary author, best be in that 1%. Ideally, that means coming from the south-east of England, because then you have a 35% chance of gaining a place at Cambridge if you apply, compared to just 26% if you live in Wales. (This figure drops to 19% for Welsh students who apply to Oxford.) It also means being upper class economically: in 2017 it was revealed that more than four fifths of offers to Oxbridge were to the ‘sons and daughters of people in the two top socio-economic classes’, and that the situation is steadily growing worse.

All of which raises the question: should we call simply for culture to be publicly funded and risk continuing to bestow opportunities and resources primarily on those who have long received the bulk of them, thus reinforcing the existing hierarchies? The evidence is that the current institutions and structures are not working for everyone – especially not working-class, Black and Global Majority people, whose parents largely do not belong to the top two socio-economic classes. (Over 50% of Black children in the UK are growing up in poverty, according to analysis of Government statistics by the Labour Party.) Given the injustice of the situation, should a certain amount of those opportunities and resources be disinvested from the cultural sphere as it exists now – which is predominantly upper and middle class and, very often, straight, white, Christian, heteronormative, cis-gendered and male? Should they be strategically transferred to other areas of society, with a view to generating art and creativity in the UK that is more diverse (and hopefully less safe, boring and anti-intellectual as well)?

My title, ‘Defund Culture’, as well as referring to the government’s withdrawal of public backing for the arts, is of course an homage to the contemporary demand for the defunding of the police. This is a demand with a long history connected to struggles over class and racial injustice. In the US Angela Davis and other activists were already calling for the defunding of the police in the 1960s. Davis herself traces the history of this demand back to at least 1935. That was the year W. E. B. Du Bois published Black Reconstruction in America, in which he pushed for the abolition of institutions such as prisons and police forces that he saw as being entrenched in racist beliefs. It was the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement in the summer of 2020, however, following the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade and many others, that brought the call for the police to be defunded to renewed prominence in the US and to a lesser extent UK. This demand was then given further impetus in the latter by a number of events that took place in 2021. They include the conviction of Wayne Couzens – a serving officer nicknamed ‘the rapist’ by some of his earlier colleagues in the force ‘as a joke’ – for luring Sarah Everard into his car using his police credentials, and then kidnapping, raping and killing her. The police used force to break up a vigil for Everard on the grounds that it was an illegal gathering under the coronavirus lockdown regulations in operation at the time – a response later deemed to have breached ‘fundamental rights’ by both a parliamentary inquiry and a 2022 high court ruling. There was also the guilty verdict passed on another officer, Mark Kennedy, for having an exploitative long-term relationship with an environmental and social justice activist while undercover; as well as the arrest and eventual jailing of Jamie Lewis and Deniz Jaffer, a pair of police constables who took ‘inappropriate photographs’ of murdered sisters Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman, and then shared them in two WhatsApp groups.

As has often been noted, #DefundThePolice does not necessarily mean abolishing all law enforcement – although it’s sometimes interpreted in that way, by its opponents especially, among whom are that powerful minority for whom the role of police is to protect their land, property and interests. Instead, what this demand is perhaps most commonly taken to mean is that if forces are not serving their communities, and are rather harming large sections of them, including women, working-class people and people of colour, their sizes should be reduced. At least some of the public money the police receive to ensure everyone’s safety and security should then be transferred to other sections of society – local residents, voluntary organisations, citizens groups and so forth – to provide community help and resources in different ways. There’s a recognition, too, that the police today are required to deal with a great number of problems they are not properly trained for and that are better handled by others. So Defund the Police can also mean debundling a lot of their responsibilities and redistributing them to the likes of educators, drug clinicians and mental health specialists, instead of requiring officers to act as everything from social workers and peace negotiators to ambulance crew. That said, for some scholars and activists, Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Mariame Kaba among them, defunding the police is undoubtedly about working toward a police-free future. It’s about forces being fully disinvested and disbanded and cities being without police and even policing (which is not the same as their being without help, public safety or first responders). Whichever way it’s interpreted, though, Defund the Police is concerned with taking a new, different, decriminalising approach to law enforcement, rather than privatising it or reforming it by punishing a few individuals as bad apples. The idea is to present a radical vision of the future in which the structural and systemic issues that lead to crime, such as social and economic inequality, poverty and homelessness, are addressed in a fashion that offers life-giving alternatives to the carceral logic of the prison industrial complex.  

The call to Defund the Police is frequently rejected as unrealistic, as well as threatening. Indeed, the association with #DefundThePolice is one of the reasons Black Lives Matter is often condemned as ‘Marxist’ and extremist, even though as a horizontal and decentralised movement it does not have just one politics. (Most obviously, in the UK, as far as culture is concerned, it is this association that has led the government and some fans to criticise football players for taking the knee, insofar as this anti-racist gesture is perceived as having politically radical overtones.) Yet Defund the Police is a philosophy that is backed up by the available research (much of which is captured in Alex Vitale’s The End of Policing) – to the extent that, as Howard Henderson and Ben Yisrael point out, at least 13 cities in the United States have engaged in policies designed to defund the police. Similarly, in an article on how it was Elinor Ostrom’s inquiries into defunding the police that led to her celebrated work on the commons – that is on how people can manage and share resources in their community – Aaron Vansintjan notes how ‘Indigenous Peoples continue to practice safety without the police, such as a community in Whitehorse, Canada. Indigenous citizens of Chéran, Mexico “threw out” the police and took safety into their own hands. There is now little crime that was otherwise common in this part of Mexico.’

Can an equally radical vision of the future be presented regarding culture in the UK? As with the call to defund the police, until culture is by and for all of society, and not primarily private school and Oxbridge-educated white people from the south-east of England, should we demand that it, too, be defunded – with some institutions even abolished – and the responsibilities for participating in, managing and sharing culture redistributed to others?

This essay is intended more as a speculative provocation than an economic plan. However, there are a number of ways of funding a more radical redistribution of opportunities and resources that it might be worth exploring as a starting point. They include:

• Defunding London and the south-east: for example, by ensuring a disproportionate share of financial support – whether it comes directly from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport or via Arts Council England (ACE) – no longer continues to go to London and the likes of the Tate, National Gallery and V&A (all of which benefited historically from slavery). Despite repeated calls for a change to this policy, an analysis of data for 2018-19 shows that London still attracts around a third of ACE investment. This works out as £24 per person, with other areas of the country receiving only £8.

• Defunding private education by taking away the public subsidies and charitable status of private schools and reallocating their endowments, investments and properties with a view to gradually abolishing these establishments. (The policy of abolishing private schools featured in the 1979 Labour Party Manifesto and was approved by the Labour Party conference as recently as 2019.)

• Defunding Oxbridge, since as we have seen it, too, is not working for all of society. Money could then be redirected to encourage projects such as the attempt of Cambridge PhD student Melz Owusu to set up The Free Black University in the wake of the Black Lives Matter2 protests. Owusu wants to decolonise higher education by redistributing knowledge and funding, and putting Black students and staff at its centre, along with a radically reconceived university structure, curriculum, teaching, learning and assessment system. As Owusu recounts: ‘I was like, hmm, this idea of transforming the university from the inside and having a decolonised curriculum isn’t going to happen with the way the structures of the university are.’ Many universities are ‘built on colonisation – the money, buildings, architecture – everything is colonial’.

(I’m not advocating abolishing Oxbridge, or universities, or indeed all liberal cultural institutions. I prefer to go beyond modernist-left liberal discourses to advocate a radically pluralized politics that is capable of including the modernist-left, the liberal and the pluriversal at the same time. However, I’m aware there are those who do advocate abolishing the university as well as the police and prisons. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, for example, write that the left slogan ‘“universities, not jails,” marks a choice that may not be possible. … perhaps more universities promote more jails. Perhaps it is necessary finally to see that the university produces incarceration as the product of its negligence. Perhaps there is another relation between the University and the Prison – beyond simple opposition or family resemblance – that …. of another abolitionism’.)

It’s so apparent as to have become almost a cliché, but the impacts of Sars-CoV-2 have offered us a chance to present a radically different vision of what the future of society can look like and how we can make it happen. (Both the BBC and Guardian are running major series, titled Rethink and Reconstruction After Covid respectively, to explore how society should change in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak.) Such a transformative change will be disruptive of the status quo. Yet with respect to culture (and much else besides) the coronavirus has already been disruptive of the status quo – albeit in ways that have sometimes served the interests of the Government and their allies in business and the media. Moreover, as the Conservative Party’s response to the Covid-19 crisis shows, we can make transformations in our priorities today that previously would have been considered unreasonable. Ideas about big state intervention in social life that might once have been dismissed as Marxist or socialist were suddenly the only thing that could save us. Between February 2020 and July 2021 the UK Government devoted a total of £370 billion to dealing with the pandemic and its economic impact. Not to introduce profound changes in the financing of arts and culture is therefore clearly a political decision, not a pragmatic one.

In arguing for the defunding of culture I appreciate there’s a danger of building a case that could quite easily appear to lead to a further stifling of critique of the Government, Brexit, authoritarian nationalism or the free market by undermining liberal institutions such as the National Theatre and National Trust. However, the likes of #DefundtheBBC and proposal of Dowden’s successor, Nadine Dorries, to axe the corporation’s licence fee, which issue from the right, are not the only alternatives to advocating for financial assistance to be given to those social and cultural elites who have long received the lion’s share of it. The creative industries can be taken in a very different direction to either of these options. It may seem a strange thing to say at a time when liberal democracy is under violent attack in many parts of the world, including from both populist authoritarianism and antiliberalism. But the undermining of certain liberal institutions is precisely what is required if we want to reconstruct a better world after the coronavirus crisis.  A world in which it is not private school and Oxbridge-educated straight white cis people from London and the south-east who receive the vast majority of support when it comes to participating in art and culture, while others in society are marginalised, overlooked or otherwise silenced.