Damian Cruden: A society without art is bound to be truly poor

NO-ONE can fail to notice that we are confronting "a crisis" in our nation's finances. We are offered a simple solution: cut public spending radically.

We have been profligate in our ways and now must prepare for our medicine. There is an unstated concept that public spending is

bad for us. Rather hard to swallow, I think.

It is undeniable that the public purse must be used more responsibly; there are excesses in the arena of public expenditure. However, the concept that the only solution is across-the-board cuts is nave.

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Aside from the fact that public spending creates employment

which, in turn, raises tax revenue and all unemployed people cost

more than they contribute, some public finance generates more income for the nation's purse than it costs.

We have a government playing economic Kerplunk; for the sake of "small government" they seem prepared to throw out the baby with the bath water.

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Why reduce possible future revenue streams by cutting off the little seed money required to invigorate a highly profitable industry?

The arts generate far more than they cost, they represent a wonderful collaboration between the private and public sector. Every theatre visit generates a further 7.77 spending. Significantly 29 per cent of our overseas visitors come for our performing arts alone.

Who wants to tell all the local restaurants or taxi drivers that the theatre is shut?

The public arts sector creates work that the private sector cannot; investors then exploit this to make considerable sums of money for themselves and the Treasury.

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Who would have invested in a play featuring puppet horses set in the First World War, or starring a 100-year-old steam engine,

French uprisings in the 1840s, or, indeed, about the financial collapse of the a major capitalist organisation?

War Horse, The Railway Children, Les Miserables and Enron, all originating in the subsidised theatre, have been running in

the West End and reaping great dividends for the Chancellor in

VAT returns.

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In 2007, from an investment of 120m (about 0.02 per cent of government spending), 100m was returned in VAT alone and the overall economic impact of theatre was in excess of 2.6bn.

Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt needs to recognise that you don't get the West End without regional theatres. It is in the subsidised sector that great ideas emerge and future talents are nurtured.

His notion that we can adopt an American form of philanthropy is ill-informed, especially when one considers regional arts.

Having spent time recently in both Los Angeles and New York, I was dismayed at the poverty of the theatre industry. Many there were jealous of our diverse and accessible cultural life.

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York Theatre Royal has a dedicated staff, believing in the value of public service.

Our intention is to offer our community and guests access to the performing arts, we are not highly paid but we are highly skilled. We are very cost effective – public investment accounts for only 24 per cent of our turnover.

There is no slack in our organisation; a cut in investment to us will restrict what we offer our community, resulting in a reduction in turnover; thereby threatening our ability to continue growing. What saving does this represent?

My great sadness is that our leaders seem incapable of having a proper conversation with us.

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Some millionaires are telling us that we have all been too greedy

and now we have to pay the price. For the past 20 years, we've been encouraged to believe that consumerism is the glue holding society together.

It would now appear that this is something of lie. Retail therapy, it seems, has been our undoing; perhaps a society investing more in a cultural life would have spent less in the mall.

With the opposition in chaos, the Government is free to attack the fundamental concepts upon which our society has rested since the Second World War.

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The uncertainty that we all feel is the result of a deliberate destabilisation, designed to fragment all opposition to the re-engineering of our cultural way of being.

It is sad that we are reduced to an economic argument for the arts, yet I fear that the present administration is incapable of understanding the concept that art is a right and necessity, just as health and civil defence are.

If we are to be safe walking the streets at night, it would be nice to have somewhere to go.

Without art in our lives, we will be at odds, lacking the ability to empathise with our fellow beings and being less inclined to care.

Make no mistake, a society without art is bound to be truly poor.

Damian Cruden is artistic director of the York Theatre Royal.