07-05-2025
British culture is excluding the majority. Labour is to blame
The arts have a class problem. I can't believe I'm writing this in 2025, but it's true – in fact, the situation is worse than ever. Class is on my mind thanks to the news that New Writing North, a charity based in Newcastle, has launched an initiative called The Bee. Backed by Michael Sheen, The Bee will include a literary magazine, a podcast and an outreach programme in an attempt to increase working-class representation. They'll even offer an 'alternative canon' of fiction that includes New Grub Street by George Gissing and Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh.
New Writing North is an important organisation, and the involvement of Sheen will hopefully add star wattage to a serious crisis. The Sutton Trust, which monitors social mobility in the UK, reported in 2014 that only 12 per cent of those who worked in publishing came from working-class backgrounds; the proportion of middle-class workers has risen steadily since. I fear that as advances for novels and publishing salaries continue to stagnate, talented youngsters will choose better-paid and more secure professions such as law or accountancy.
We're too easily fooled by the odd high-profile success. Much was made, for instance, and quite rightly, of Douglas Stuart's assured 2020 debut novel Shuggie Bain which drew on his impoverished and dysfunctional Scottish childhood. But Stuart wasn't a young voice who'd been financially cushioned – he was a working professional in his mid-forties, a boy who'd grown up poor in the 1980s and through talent and determination forged a successful career in the New York fashion world.
It isn't just books. Careers in the arts are, in generally, badly paid, and any working-class youngster hoping for a career in theatre, opera or visual art (whether as an artist or behind the scenes) will struggle to make a living. Even pop, once seen as the preserve of the working-class young, feels as if it's becoming increasingly bourgeois. Charli XCX, Mumford and Sons, The Last Dinner Party – so many leading musicians can boast of a pukka education. This has been the case for a couple of decades now – but once upon a time it was just Joe Strummer and the majority of Genesis.
The depressing thing about all of this is that we have gone backwards. Social mobility, in truth, ended at some point in the 1970s. Blame the Labour Party: under their education secretary Anthony Crosland, they scrapped a grammar-school system that had worked perfectly well for 40 years and thus – surprisingly for a bunch of socialists – blocked poor children's path to a brighter future.
Up to this point, the grammar had been the great social leveller. It ensured that British artistic talent was diverse: we had actors such as Eileen Atkins, artists such as David Hockney, and authors such as David Storey and Shelagh Delaney. Yes, as Britain boomed in the years that followed, the less privileged could still gain a foothold and make a decent living – an artist such as Tracey Emin proved that a non-Establishment voice still had the power to make a mark on the cultural landscape.
And, superficially at least, efforts have been made to make the arts more diverse. Most big organisations now have outreach programmes in a bid to make culture less posh. But while this is laudable, granting someone access to culture isn't the same as helping them to pursue a career in it.
In talking about this problem, we say 'working class' as a catch-all; but, in truth, it's no longer only working-class Britons who are being shut out from culture. If you're from a bog-standard middle-class family with a household salary of £35,000 – pretty much the national average – it's unlikely that you'll be able to afford the luxury of trying to write that novel or screenplay. There's a reason you don't hear of many playwrights who are the children of nurses or primary-school teachers.
And experience bears this out: the vast majority of professionals I encounter in the arts are well-to-do. Time and again, I meet people with lovely, creative jobs and wonder: 'How on earth can you afford to live in West Hampstead?' And then the penny drops.
If Labour were to blame for essentially destroying social mobility 50 years ago, then they are hardly making amends under Keir Starmer. Earlier this year, the Prime Minister did address the 'posh problem' in the arts when he acknowledged that almost half of British cultural stars nominated for an award over the past decade were privately educated. He also recognised that the UK creative industries are worth £1.25 billion to the economy, and pledged to make the arts more accessible.
These are useful facts, but there has to be more than words. The problem is that nobody is joining up the dots here. The promised access will not necessarily materialise into any sort of career opportunities for those from a poorer background. Unless arts organisations or publishers can start to make starting salaries more attractive, culture will continue to be ruled by an elite minority. And the issue isn't simply one of money: introducing a new generation of youngsters from all backgrounds to art and literature will have benefits to them, and in due course, to older Britons too (in the culture they create).
To keep pressing for this has never seemed more important, especially in a country where the arts in education, under the last Conservative government, were denuded. I hope The Bee, and projects like it, can succeed. Otherwise, effecting real change, and creating a meritocracy that cuts across class barriers in the way that it did until half a century ago, will forever feel like an impossible dream.
