Creative spending

Tony Hall, former head of BBC news and current chief executive of the Royal Opera House, argues for increased public funding for the arts:

"If you put the arts in the bigger picture, and talk about them as part of the framework of the creative and cultural industries, the argument that asks 'can the arts really make a splash, do they really matter?' becomes very clear," Mr Hall told the Guardian.

"They are part of something fundamental and big, which is the creative economy, which is now what we live off. And when you look at it like that then arts funding becomes a no-brainer ... our future depends on creativity."

He said statistics suggested that at least 5% of Britain's GDP was accounted for by the creative industries, which have been growing at twice the rate of the economy as a whole over the past decade. Exports by the music and computer games industries now earned as much as steel and textiles exports, while ticket sales for live music were worth £850m a year.

"When you look at the big picture the government should subsidise what we do and we should be taken more seriously by the government and the public as a whole."

Come on Tony, if the arts are so valauable, shouldn't they be self-supporting? And, wouldn't the arts be self-supporting if they had broad appeal? Tony has a solution to the lack of appeal problem, make attendance compulsory:

Mr Hall urged the government to include as part of the national curriculum a requirement that all pupils see a live arts performance each year.

Stuff that culture into them while they're young, eh Tony?