Hot Seat

 If anyone were looking for proof that there is a life after politics, Matthew Taylor, one-time Labour Party candidate and former Chief Adviser on Political Strategy to Tony Blair in New Labour’s glory days, is evidence enough. He arrived at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) as Director in 2006, having headed a major think-tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), for the previous four years, and admits to being “fascinated by ideas and research”. He and his team are in the news in the arts world, not only for the RSA’s innovative programmes on the arts and ecology and the ambitious Citizens of the Future project in Peterborough, but because he was one of the driving forces behind the State of the Arts conference in London last month, in partnership with Arts Council England (ACE). Looking at his record over the past two years, it seems like a logical extension of what he has tried to do at the RSA.

 POLITICAL ANIMAL
“Having struggled with trying to change the Labour Party, and to explain to politicians that the Labour Party had to change to have a future, I was keen to get my hands on this sort of member organisation,” he explains. “The RSA doesn’t have to fight elections, but it’s harder in other ways – there are strong overlaps between Fellows’ enthusiasm and values, but there’s no modern core mission.” He has worked to strengthen the research aspect of the organisation (“you’ll see the best of our work starting to emerge in the year ahead”) and bolstered the events programme and the online platform for ideas (“two million of our video lectures are downloaded each year”). He claims that the RSA is emerging as a global brand – it now boasts over 27,000 Fellows across the world, describing them as “social entrepreneurs to scientists, community leaders to commercial innovators, artists and journalists to architects and engineers, and many more”.
His focus on an ongoing partnership with ACE, and through that with the wider arts world, has resulted in last month’s conference which brought together 500 delegates from across the English arts scene, and a few notable attenders from Wales and Scotland. The idea goes back to his days at IPPR, when he helped to create the Oxford Media Convention. This generated the idea that the arts should have its own high-powered annual conference. “I’ve always been interested in cultural policy,” he says, “but I found that the evidence base is pretty weak, and it goes round and round the same tired dichotomies such as ‘arts for art’s sake’ and the instrumental agenda. I wanted to burst through that.” Taylor credits his “amazing” Director of External Affairs, Nina Bolognesi, and her team for “doing 99% of the work”, but admits to a strong sense of achievement as he stood up to introduce the event. He sees it as part of the process of the sector coming of age, “talking about arts policy with the rigour and seriousness that the sector deserves”. The hope is to make this an annual event, possibly to bring in other UK nations as partners, and also to bring in international influences to enable the arts sector to learn from good practice elsewhere.

DESPATCH BOXING
The conference was book-ended by sessions with a potential new Culture Secretary – the Tories’ Jeremy Hunt – and the current incumbent, Labour’s Ben Bradshaw (see p2). Just imagining that Hunt gets the job after the next election, what would Taylor’s seasoned political advice be to the sector? “I think a lot of people fail when they engage with politics,” he says. “You have to start with an analysis of what the people you’re facing are trying to achieve, and what problems they face. Where are the Tories coming from? There’s no point the sector saying ‘we wish the world was a different place and we wish you were different people’… Whoever wins the election, arts and culture is not perceived as being a marginal junior voice any more. People really get it that the arts are central to economic dynamism, social inclusion and solidarity.”
However, Bradshaw seems confident that he’ll still be in the job after May – and he did his best to convince the conference that he has the chops to maintain and defend arts funding. Does Taylor agree? “What Labour is offering you is broadly more of the same,” he opines, “a positive commitment to arts policy, a new enthusiasm for an active industrial policy recognising the importance of the creative industries, and an attempt to gradually increase public entitlement to arts and culture. What I don’t sense from listening to Ben is that he’s got a huge reform package. He doesn’t think there are massive problem to be solved – the point is to maintain the momentum of the past few years.”
As far as his own future is concerned, he tells me that his ambition remains undimmed. “I have had to learn that it’s not easy changing an institution that is 250 years old, and I have found ambition and energy weren’t enough, so I’ve had to confront some of my own frailties as a person and as a manager in this job.” Seeing him bounding from session to session at the State of the Arts event, it is difficult to imagine him running out of steam.