Another day, another opinion on what’s wrong with the arts. This week we’ve got a report, ‘Class Ceiling’, by Manchester University Chancellor Nazir Afzal and retired NEU official Avis Gilmore. The paper is billed as ‘A Review of Working Class Participation in the Arts Across Greater Manchester’, and sees the difficulty with the arts as being, besides the perennial one of lack of money, one of equality of access for the working class. It says that low pay, the absence of established networks and the lack of a career structure make it too difficult for those without money or connections to make it into the arts, or to see their ‘lived experience’ in them.
To deal with these problems it makes some recommendations. It would like to see the Equality Act supplemented to make class discrimination illegal; the publication of all kinds of socio-economic data; all jobs to be formally advertised with structured interviews; a complete ban on informal hiring; permanent advisory panels representing working class creatives; and a publicly paid Class Champion. These ideas are well-meaning. But will they work?
For one thing, it sounds good to say that working-class people need to be protected from missing out. If you can’t discriminate because of race or religion, you shouldn’t be allowed to indulge class prejudice either. But unlike race or religion, this immediately creates very difficult problems of definition. What makes you working class? Money? Accent? Education? Or is it a matter of hoary social cliché? Take the daughter of an Anglican vicar (stipend something over £30,000) and the son of a train driver (close to £70,000). Are either, both or neither working class? A well-spoken junior bank official (£35,000-plus) and a Cockney London plumber (don’t mention the money). Which class are they? If we assume that a train driver is working class, do his children share any ‘lived experience’ with those of a hard-working immigrant cleaner juggling two jobs just to make ends meet?
There are more problems with the suggestions made in the report. In more staid environments – banking or local government – there is a clear way of finding out at interview who is objectively the best candidate for a job. But the arts don’t work that way. Some bands are wildly successful, for example, while others eke out a living in whatever venues will have them. Most of the time we can’t predict with much accuracy which productions will fill houses and which won’t, which dance troupes can make a living for their participants and which will end up as best as spare-time activities carried on for love rather than money.
Some people are good at spotting talent, probably without much idea of how they do it. This can require a good deal of guesswork, intuition and at times faith. Unfortunately, this is exactly what the prescription in this report will not help. Solemnly requiring arts appointments to follow some dreary HR-approved template, with structured interviews to avoid appearance of bias, and to be subject to a more or less formal career structure, will have one clear effect: it will weed out originals and advantage anyone who won’t rock the boat. And having some kind of class champion in the wings, hired no doubt using impeccable public sector criteria, will make matters even worse. Is this really the kind of arts establishment we want?
It’s not obvious that producers of the arts ought to reflect the make-up of society
Finally, let us assume that a disproportionate number of posh middle-class people do indeed enter the arts. Does this actually matter? It’s not obvious that producers of the arts ought to reflect the make-up of society as a whole, or that they would be any more successful if they did. True, respondents to surveys may complain that they don’t see their lived experience reflected in the arts scene. But do working class audiences think the same? Many are only too happy to watch productions such as Bridgerton or Wolf Hall. Many, one suspects, would find gritty kitchen sink dramas ineffably boring.
There are many reasons to worry about the arts. School curriculums are producing a generation of philistines; people employed in the industry don’t earn enough; there is lessening in financial support from the state (even if the Arts Council still distributes well over £12 million a week). Whatever the answer to these problems is, earnest demands from the Manchester elite for more participation from an idealised working class is not so much an answer but a distraction.
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