What is British culture?

WHEN middle-aged men get excited about the Spice Girls, the cause is usually obvious enough. When, however. the middle aged men in question are members of the British cabinet, something rather stranger must be afoot. The excitement with which the Conservative Party in Britain greeted the revelation that the Spice Girls were Tories pointed to two significant facts about the relationship between politics and culture in Britain. One is that, even in the heyday of the Conservatives in the 1980s, most people involved in the arts remained broadly on the left. And the other is that, in spite of this, even the most blinkered of politicians sense that the arts do have a kind of political power.

Somewhere behind the arguments over Europe and the economy that have dominated the British election campaign can be heard the distant rumble of a cultural war. Labour, with everyone from Melvyn Bragg to Noel Gallagher in its armoury, has been winning. With John Major's typical haplessness, even the Spice Girls have split with some deciding to back Labour after all, leaving him with allies such as Phil Collins, Ken Barlow (William Roache), and Gary Barlow, a well known member of the Eurosceptic wing of Take That.

If the celebrity endorsements are mere trivia, though, the underlying contest for the soul of British culture is more serious. It is not accidental that Britain led the way in the state sponsorship of the arts or that it did so in the aftermath of the second World War, when its place in the world had become deeply uncertain.

With the empire on the Wayout, and the war itself having demonstrated the economic, military and cultural supremacy of the US's, Britain's elite saw in the arts a way of creating both a new social consensus and a new ideal of British greatness. As the great economist John Maynard Keynes who was, as its first chairman, a key figure in the development of the Arts Council of Great Britain, put it in his final broadcast. "Let every part of Merry England be merry. Death to Hollywood."

The state sponsored public culture that was created may not have killed Hollywood, but it did become a powerful force in British and by extension Irish life. Theatre, television, the visual arts and classical music flourished on public funding. In the 1960s and 1970s, the state even paid artists to attack it, funding, in one form or another, Marxist theatre companies and aesthetic revolutionaries. The idea of consensus was stretched to breaking point.

Margaret Thatcher, however, had no interest in consensus, which she famously described as "the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values, and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects." And she applied these conclusions to the arts. In her memoirs she denounced the whole idea of state support for the arts "I am not convinced that the state should play Maecenas. Artistic talent let alone artistic genius is unplanned, unpredictable, eccentrically individual I wanted to see the private sector raising more money and bringing business acumen and efficiency to bear on the administration of cultural institutions."

The cultural infrastructure the BBC, the Arts Council, the universities, the British Council was not attacked directly. But it was squeezed by a combination of financial pressure and the appointment by the government of compliant directors like the Tory fund raiser Robert McAlpine and donor Peter Palumbo to the Arts Council and the Conservative Marmaduke Hussey to the BBC. What the cultural historian Robert Hewison describes as "a new breed of nabobs entrepreneurs, public relations experts, newspaper executives with a different concept of public responsibility took control." Local government institutions most notably the Greater London Council who tried to provide an alternative umbrella for arts and cultural activity were crushed.

The result, however, was. even from Mrs Thatcher's point of view, double edged. She certainly succeeded in neutralising the cultural institutions as a source of opposition to her programme of reshaping Britain. But it was a negative success only. No new Conservative culture arose from the ashes to take the place of the old lefty mainstream. And most of the arts establishment was forced into, at best, sullen discontent. Behind the taunts about "Luvvies for Labour" and "the chattering classes" there was the reality that much of both the old arts world and of the emerging popular culture of Britain in the late 1980s and early 1990s was deeply antipathetic to the Tories.

The most succinct expression of what was happening was given by Terry Eagleton in his 1992 inaugural lecture as Thomas Wharton Professor of English Literature in Oxford University, itself the kind of post that would once have been a bastion of cultural consensus. "What has happened", he told his audience, "is that culture is less and less able to fulfil its classical role of reconciliation . . . For culture is palpably part of the problem rather than the solution it is the very medium in which battle is engaged, rather than some Olympian terrain on which our differences can be recomposed. It is bad news for this traditional concept of culture that the conflicts which have dominated the political agenda for the past couple of decades . . . have been precisely ones in which language, values, identity, and experience have been to the fore.

FOR a short time after John Major replaced Margaret Thatcher, there was a glimmer of a Conservative cultural project. Major's "Minister for Fun" David Mellor (his official title of Minister for Heritage rather than Minister for Culture was eloquent in itself) had a genuine interest in the arts and with the British National Lottery about to open up new sources of funding, seemed capable of developing an active cultural strategy from the right. In an eerily neat comeuppance, however, his political career was laid low by his dalliance with an unemployed actress. Since then, arts policy, like almost every other area of government under Major, has been characterised mostly by drift and uncertainty.

If Labour wins the election, the result will be greatly welcomed by most of those who work in the arts and cultural industries which, in spite of everything, still employ half a million people in the UK. It is widely assumed that Melvyn Bragg will be given a powerful role, possibly as an overall supremo for the arts. Labour produced a detailed cultural manifesto before the election, promising, among other things, to introduce Irish style tax breaks for the film industry, to concentrate on the arts in schools, and to establish a National Endowment for Sports, Technology and the Arts to nurture individual talent. The relentless pressure to privatise the BBC and Channel 4 will probably be halted.

Whether a Labour government could re-establish the patrician consensus that dominated post war British culture is, however, very doubtful. If anything it is more likely that the process of increasing diversity set in train by Labour's plans for Scottish and Welsh parliaments may actually make the notion of "British culture" itself redundant. As in so many other areas, the effects of the long period of Tory rule will not end with a change of government.