The Arts: white, middle-class, posh. Why?

****

There's an interesting comparison made in a Spectator article between those working in The Arts and the evil dark ones working in the City:

The evil scumbags who work in the City appear to be doing a better job at being modern and liberal than the state-subsidised art world. According to last year’s Creative Skillset Employment Census, 5.4 per cent of those working in the arts were from the black or ethnic minorities. In the City, by contrast, figures from 2012 show that 30.5 per cent of employees were from the black or ethnic minorities.

So why is this? The author of the article doesn't speculate, he merely presents the information with a huge grin on his face. After all The Arts is filled with the insufferably right-on, puffed up to their middle-class ears with a sort of sub-Gramscian socialist nonsense. Always good to take them down a step from their righteous moral high ground.

Maybe that's it. Perhaps all those sons and daughters of immigrants are heading off into the private sector because that's where the opportunities are? I recall a speech to a "Pakistani Power 100" dinner from a news presenter. This successful Pakistani woman described the mantra of her childhood about careers - one I'm sure familiar to every child of immigrants - "doctor, lawyer, accountant; doctor, lawyer, accountant."

And I'm guessing that the young Black or Asian who announces an intention to work in the City will be applauded and encouraged. Perhaps too, the other young child of immigrants who announces a plan to work in a theatre or in 'arts marketing' will get the lecture about parental sacrifice and how they're damn well going to go to college and study accountancy or law.

So "the arts" is filled with the children of the English middle-classes. Nice young men and women who think it somehow nobler than working in the grubby world of banking or stockbroking. And less boring. Trendies who didn't grow out of their student leftiness to embrace the real world preferring instead a world where they can pretend to be radical and iconoclastic while relying for cash on the largess of the Arts Council and local government.

Don't get me wrong here, I think The Arts are important, just as I think other pleasures - beer, football, bad TV, even stand up comedy - are important. But all those slightly scruffy, 'more-rad-than-thou' folk that populate arts organisations - attacking the establishment while snaffling every farthing that same establishment holds out to them - those people, seen from the perspective of a Black of Asian young person, are not the way to make it from a Manningham terrace or Brixton council flat to a more comfortable life.

Unlike the City of London, of course.

...

...reminding us why the City of London is so important to Britain

****

From Mr Peston:

Talking to bankers and lawyers, there is growing optimism that the City of London will join Hong Kong as an offshore centre where the Chinese currency, the renminbi (RMB), can be traded - and that an announcement on all this may not be far off. 

If that were to happen, it would be quite a big deal - and would be the culmination of talks between the UK Treasury and the Chinese authorities that are said to have made significant progress on this issue last autumn. 

More export earnings for London showing yet again how important it is to our economy:

One City figure close to the talks told me he thought there would be a billion pounds of extra business and significant new jobs created almost overnight. 

Stick that in your pipe, Occupy London and the other 'banker bashers'.

....

The City of London is Britain's great success story - let's not screw it up!

****

The Economist reports (and who am I to argue with their figures) that the City of London generates exports sales equivalent to 3% of UK GDP. That is an awful lot of money - something in the order of £40 billion.

And it means that the City really is by far our most important industry. We don't hear the Americans complaining about Hollywood or Silicon Valley, so why have we arrived at such a down on the City of London? We should be celebrating the City's success, not bashing those who work in it and generate that £40 billion in export sales.

Instead we're moaning about how much city financiers get paid and calling for intervention or regulation, some people are agitating for special taxes on the financial sector that don't apply to other transactions, and there's an eternally repeated mantra of "we should make things" rather than handle the money.

Right now between a daft attachment to a 50% top rate of tax and rhetoric about executive pay, we seem to be doing our level best to screw up the prospects for our most successful industry. This is like the Germans slapping extra regulation and taxes on machinery manufacture or the Italian introducing a product design levy.

So the financial sector (or the parts of its concerned with lending money to people buying houses) played a big part in creating the current crisis. But that's no reason for Britain to hobble its biggest export earner or to introduce policies seemingly designed to drive the future leaders of that industry to Switzerland, Hong Kong or Singapore. So the French and Germans want to clobber the City - mostly because their financial industries are pygmies beside London's - and are proceeding to do so through their de facto control of the EU.

We don't have to agree to this do we? We can use the veto and - I hope this sinks in - when it's clear that Europe proposes to use majority voting to create regulations that damage the City, we should walk away. Right now the biggest threat to recovery is the puerile attacks by politicians on our most successful industry but in the years to come the real threat is the EU and its desire for a closed, constrained, undynamic (and "low risk") financial sector.

We should put the EU - especially the leaders of France and Germany - on notice that we won't accept attacks on the City's viability as the world's biggest and richest financial centre. And if that means leaving the EU, then so be it.

....