Don’t let Nadine Dorries patronise North over arts funding and levelling up when Tories have scrapped free TV licences for over-75s – Yorkshire Post Letters

CULTURE Secretary Nadine Dorries was very patronising with the line in her column (Levelling up shake-up for arts funding, February 23) suggesting The Yorkshire Post’s readers might have only heard of the “strange new political term that’s taken over Westminster – levelling up” by watching TV.

Arts funding: My plan to end North-South divide so culture can drive levelling up agenda – Nadine Dorries

Clearly Ms Dorries is not among your regular readers, who are already familiar with ‘levelling up’ and who have been regularly kept informed about it by you. Many of us associate it with this Government’s betrayal and broken promises around important projects such as the eastern leg of HS2 and Northern Powerhouse Rail.

Nadine Dorries might be a ‘Marmite’ minister but her commitment to arts in the North is not in doubt – The Yorkshire Post says

The genuinely “strange” thing about ‘levelling up’ is that a political party would use it so prominently in its electioneering and still be unable to explain what it meant more than two years later. If it just means a little extra money for the arts, then those outside of London who “lent” their votes to Boris Johnson in 2019 have every reason to feel truly cheated by him.

Ms Dorries boasts she’s secured £43.5m more for the arts. The UK population is 67.2m. Less than 65p per person isn’t going to go very far – even with a ‘levelling up’ label on it. It’s also hypocritical for a Minister in a party that’s been in power for almost 12 years to complain regions such as Yorkshire aren’t getting their “fair share” of Arts Council funding.

If Ms Dorries believes newspaper readers outside of London can only be kept fully informed about Westminster’s goings on by watching TV, then she should ensure a licence fee-funded BBC – an organisation that has historically continued to spend in the regions as commercial rivals cut back – is properly funded.

A good place to start would be for her Government to take back responsibility for the over-75s TV licences that George Osborne – a Chancellor of the Exchequer from her own Conservative Party, remember – bounced the broadcaster into taking on in 2015.

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