Underfunded into Non- Existence

If they keep pretending like the country doesn't need any creatives to succeed, they'll run the country into the ground faster than cats plummeted at the box office.

The arts are one of the most influential, important, integral parts of society, so why the hell does the government want to underfund them into non-existence. Each and every one of you reading this article rely on the arts every day of your life, whether you’re aware of it or not; even if you are a nuclear engineer or an astrophysicist, you need the arts. You wouldn’t be reading this without them. Every person involved in Term is so grateful for the opportunities this magazine can provide them, and love being a part of it because they love the arts. But the current government have very different ideas about the importance of the arts… they don’t think they are.

Underfunding of the arts has been happening for decades in every corner of the world, but recently the UK government have made it a mission of theirs to shit on the arts like its an old rug in their grandma’s house. Let’s start with probably the biggest punch in the stomach that every dancer, performer and actor could ever receive. The Fatima ad. You know the one. The one where the government tell the ballet dancer to give up and go into cyber - yeah that one. Ok so they don’t explicitly say that, but it’s very heavily implied. The 2020 ad has the words ‘Fatima’s next job could be in cyber (she just doesn’t know it yet)” alongside a picture of a ballet dancer putting on a point shoe. I guess I get where they were going with it: no matter what you’re into you can always end up in cyber because they’re hiring and it’s a great area to go into, but the execution was poor. Like broken-before-it was-made poor.

The message it put out into the world was, dancing isn’t a real job and it won’t take you very far so give up now and join cyber because that’s reliable. So much for chasing dreams. Admittedly, being a dancer isn’t the most stable job in the world and, unless you’re doing really well with it, its not the greatest pay… but that doesn’t matter to people who love dance. They just want to do what they love for the entertainment of the people who love watching it. Think of all the young kids who dream of being on a stage every night, but saw that advert and thought their dream was impractical and stupid: it’s heart-breaking. Even as a teenager, who understands that it doesn’t matter what other people think, as long as I’m doing what makes me happy, it hurt seeing the government have absolutely no respect for something I enjoy so much and can’t appreciate beauty if it all. An element of the advert that especially didn’t sit right with me was on of the words in the campaign’s slogan –'rethink’. Almost as if those who have pursued the arts have made a mistake and need to ‘rethink’ their life choices to make the ‘right move’ into cyber. But anyway, what do I know, I enjoy dancing, so take the dancers away Boris, have fun watching The Greatest Showman.

Government attacks on the arts didn’t stop at pointless propaganda. Gavin Williamson, Education Secretary, decided, in January 2021, to spread this hatred out to all the humanities and tell them outright they won’t be funded the same as STEM subjects.

Gavin was worried about wasting taxpayer’s money on those useless subjects like media studies (as that doesn’t actually benefit the country, right?) so they decided they will allocate more funding to courses that ‘align with the priorities of the nation.’ In other words, STEM is great, humanities can do one. His exact words were “support for strategic subjects such as engineering and medicine, while slashing the taxpayer subsidy for such subjects as media studies”. A direct calling out of all media students from the government itself that their education and training is a waste of money and therefore a waste to society. Not only does this make those studying media or any liberal art feel like a waste of space, it discourages younger students from studying it further. Whether that be a 14-year-old choosing what to do for GCSE or an 18-year-old choosing a degree, anyone would be tempted to go for the one that’s better funded, better valued, better respected.

But Gavin; who’s broadcasting your all-important announcements, who’s writing up Boris’ super easy to follow corona rules, who’s on the PR team that helped Dominic Cummings out of that Durham trip scandal. I don’t know specifically who they are, but I know that they probably studied the same degrees that the government are so desperate to underfund.

If that wasn’t enough bullying of the arts: since the government is having to pay back an increasing amount of student finance debts, due to graduates not earning enough to pay back their loans, the government have had to think of a way to save themselves the money.

As they absolutely cannot make university free - or even a little cheaper – they decided instead that the most logical answer was to cap the number of students that universities can emit onto “low quality degrees”. Yes, they’re the real words the government used. A tad rich coming from a low-quality government. By ‘lowvalue courses’, they mean degree programs with low graduate earnings, but this not only reinforces the idea that money is the only determiner of success, but it also undermines the significance of the course. Not only does this create a multitude of class problems but it’s yet another hinderance to the arts and social sciences. These courses’ graduates are often paid poorly, and the government know this, so they want to create another way to limit the number of graduates for these degrees. interestingly, Gavin Williamson’s own degree could have been affected by these cuts - he studied social sociology at Bradford university, which would now be considered one of the low-quality degrees he mentioned. Nice one Gavin, undermine your own education. Its these small changes that are being made that will affect the arts in the long term and need to stop before arts departments in schools start having to share a fiver between themselves on the budget.

I make a joke about the government not caring about the arts, but this is a serious issue. If they keep pretending like the country doesn’t need any creatives to succeed, they’ll run the country into the ground faster than Cats plummeted at the Box Office. Don’t get me wrong, I fully appreciate the STEM subjects and how important they are, without them we would have really struggled our way through this pandemic STEM may be what helps us function on a basic level, but arts are what create a society, a culture, a lifestyle. Whether it be dance, literature, film or even social studies – an art is used everywhere you look, and we thank them for being what makes life exciting. As a person who studies liberal arts and humanities, wants to study liberal arts and humanities in the future and enjoys the liberal arts and humanities as entertainment, this is something important to me. I will not sit and watch the government disrespect them and pretend they’re not relevant when I know how important they are in society. Let’s make the government appreciate them before its too late.

I know you care; you’re still reading.

Written by Emily Taylor

Photography by Beth Slattery