The Media Group has, by any standards, had a pretty successful few years. In that time, we have more than doubled the number of people engaged in Media Group activities, both in the Media Workshop and in community projects around the town. To achieve this, we have more than doubled our turnover, on a reduced grant from the local authority. As we deliver such things as exhibition programmes, courses, and productions in which local people can take part and learn, we have always argued that this small annual grant of £15,000 represents excellent value for money for the council, not least because the programme is delivered by enthusiastic practictioners, professional and amateur together.
The Media Group is run by its users. A voluntary association since 1983, we voted at our 2010 Annual General Meeting to become a full legal entity, a multi-stakeholder cooperative. In future the Group will be run by its users AND its workers.
But all of this is just candy floss when it comes to the crisis now facing the arts in Darlington. After a funding agreement that was supposedly going to “measure our performance” against these user and finance targets, the debate has simply moved on to the world of drastic spending cuts. Just as decisions are about to be made about the future of the arts in Darlington, it is worth standing back for a few moments to consider why we have come to the situation we are in.
A little remembered speech by David Laws during his brief tenure of the post of Chief Secretary of the Treasury in May included the following:
“Unless we send out this sort of shock wave through Government departments to say ‘You can’t spend on all these areas’, that they are not actually priorities, we won’t get the step change in behaviour we expect.”
Shock is a well-worn tactic for those who would like to see less state activity and more privatisation. It is eloquently detailed by Naomi Klein in her book The Shock Doctrine. The idea is to shock local decision makers and people alike into accepting drastic changes, “step changes” in their lives. This doctrine was handed down to local authorities like Darlington with the news of a whopping 28% cut in their central government funding. The message was clear – the state will play a much-reduced role in future. But crucially, the debate about the alternative has been going on in government circles, local and national, for a number of years. Officers at the Town Hall have been quietly working on the so-called “enabling council” model for some time, with reorganisation already well down the road.
So when the 28% cut in local government grant was announced, the underlying message was clear – speed up the moves towards an enabling council. Darlington’s Labour councillors are indeed genuinely shocked, and it is understandable that they feel the need for urgency in resolving the problem. So the decision to drop nearly all arts spend was indeed done in a state of panic. A Labour council has stated its priorities – to defend the weakest in our town – and “luxuries” like the arts need to go. Fortunately for the council, Darlington for Culture has stepped in, and is now busy trying to put together a plan to save the Arts Centre. And a key aspect of that plan is the Cultural Parliament, which offers a democratic way of involving local people and local artists in running the programme at the Arts Centre. Sound familiar? Yes, the Media Group model. And DMG has been approached to be involved. But we openly wonder whether this is really the model that local councillors will support, after years of rubbing shoulders with the “enabling council” people. Is the Cultural Parliament a democratic idea too far? Watch this space.