The Olympics stink
The Olympics - a Great British travesty in self-promotion - has meant the Arts Council's Lottery funding has been slashed by 35% (source).
Sunday’s cut, will choke the already under funded British art scene.
The (buried) news of the cutback has prompted the usually nonpartisan Penguin Island to well and truly nail its colours to the mast.
Already the predicted cost is £9bn (watch it rise) – the original bid estimate was £2.35bn, they forgot the VAT. And Londoners are set to pay an extra £20 a year for 10 years in Council Tax, dismissed by Livingston as no more than a walnut whip (38p) a week.
Ken, you patronizing bleep no one wants to eat a Walnut Whip a week for the next decade in order to pay for yours and Blair’s legacy attempt. Or to be left at the end with a bleeping great concrete coach park over what was once one of London’s most beautiful wildlife areas.
Nor for that matter to be visually insulted over the next half century by the predictable onslaught of cheap badly designed buildings, serving no one but the greedy developers that persuaded you to bid in the first place.
Penguin Island will now take this opportunity to congratulate its Parisian friends in avoiding this fiscal no-ender, in the hope to go stay at theirs in 5 years time.
If you don’t think the money would have been better spent on schools and hospitals click here.
5 comments:
Whilst I agree that reducing Arts Council funding is regretful do you not think that Britain could do with a kick up its fat arse in the sports arena too?
yes i do, but there are other ways of doing this (better school sports facilities) than spending the following
£3.1bn: Site construction
£1.7bn: Regeneration and infrastructure
£2.7bn: Programme contingency
£840m: Olympic Delivery Authority tax bill
£600m: Extra security
£390m: Non-ODA provision
(source bbc 15/03/07)
PS what is the non-oda provision thing anyway?
Dear Penguin,
I felt I had to respond to your latest rant. To equate the diversion of lottery funding referred to in your article with a 35% cut in Arts Council lottery funding is inaccurate, misleading, and frankly typical of the slapdash standards of journalism practised in blogging.
First, the £675m of lottery money now earmarked for Olympic spending would not have been channelled exclusively to the Arts - it would have been split between all the lottery's good causes. Your source appears to have miscalculated in this regard.
Second, the reported cut in funding for the Arts Council's Grants for Arts scheme is due mainly to falling lottery sales, NOT to lottery money being set aside to pay for the Olympics. Another 'miscalculation'.
While this doesn't create quite such an arresting headline, it is at least based on fact. I respectfully request that you check your sources more carefully in future.
Hattie, thank you for your comment.
No one is saying that the 675m of lottery money would have gone entirely to the arts.
However this year Arts Council funding has been cut by 29million. If it is true that this may in part be due to a fall in ticket sales, shouldn't the cuts be across the board? Should the ODA not get less?
(For sure the decline in ticket sales were not factored into the original bid.)
No, you can expect the ODA to get what’s promised and any shortfall to be carried exclusively with cuts in Tessa's "good causes".
PS Expect the ODA to continue raiding the Lottery, as we get closer to 2012.
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