Crimes against The Public

Ben Wildsmith 

Today we found out that National Museum Cardiff is to close for an unspecified period. Hopefully, this will be brief and not the fulfilment of fears that have swirled around the museum since Vaughan Gething announced cuts to its budget last year.

Those cuts were subsequently reversed but anything that isn’t privately owned, in our society, exists precariously.

Libraries, school playing fields, youth clubs, day centres etc. have found themselves labelled as unaffordable luxuries for decades, leftover indulgences from a liberal past.

Such bonfires tend to spread and, whilst the match was put to public culture, it didn’t stop there.

There’s something unsettling about a police station that isn’t open to the public. Once places to seek help, lit brightly for us on the worst nights of our lives, now we are locked out of them.

You sometimes see people outside, trying to navigate the 101 system on their phones so that they can speak to the officers inside. We know our place.

Winston Churchill did not, it turns out, demand, ‘Then what are we fighting for?’ when asked to cut wartime funding to the arts. That was made up later, presumably by artists who are notoriously adept at making things up, it’s kind of their thing. It’s a pretty lie, though, isn’t it?

Pride

A glance at the historical public spaces we retain suggests that they were once our pride. The museum building itself reaches back to classical architecture, positing Cardiffians within the emblems of ancient civilization.

In public, even the poorest were to walk in splendour, their rags brushing against marble. Such buildings were statements of common intent by people who believed in the virtues of cooperation.

Private capital has oozed through every crack in society, installing itself as the default system.

Unwilling to confront the reality of Wales’ performance on Friday night in Paris, I allowed my mind to wander a bit.

Watching the Six Nations on ITV is like attending a wedding in Wetherspoons. The poetry of the day is chopped up and delivered in segments between adverts.

The arcane language and customs of rugby people are ironed out into atonal sport-speak. Where once was Bill McLaren describing how Rob Howley ‘Gets into his running like a startled whippet’, now players all ‘have a point to prove’, as if in an episode of scripted sports entertainment.

Discontent

The growling commentators, pitch-side pyrotechnics, and martial rhetoric that characterise the professional game cannot blare loudly enough to drown out discontent at its product.

Soon, ex-players will argue in court that by extracting maximum labour and value from them, rugby businesses have negligently allowed their brains to be irreparably damaged. The true cost of our £120 tickets may soon be known.

These sentiments seem rather forlorn at the moment. With AI set to take over the creative industries and the free world led by a man one assumes has gold plated his pubes, it’s a tricky time for finer feelings.

There is a sense that we should be grateful that culture exists at all in an environment that is so hostile, not just to the arts, but to the basic concept of fellow feeling.

When cuts to the museum were announced, the explanation was that the NHS had to be our priority. This is how the quasi-religious status of the NHS is used against us. There is nothing immune from this argument.

If funding is proposed for anything at all then it can be waved away as taking money from the NHS.

The public realm in the UK has shrunk so dramatically, with even the armed forces at token levels, that the NHS comprises nearly all of it.

As everything that makes life worth living is either devalued into neglect or monetized and fenced off, people have suffered. That suffering often leads people through the doors of the NHS, after all which others remain open?

It cannot be the case that NHS funding is the only possible pot to raid for public projects.

As our leisure centres crumble, we see private gyms become more and more lavish. As libraries close, we watch the world’s accumulated knowledge stolen in one go by AI companies.

As our police hide away in locked buildings, private security guards encircle every skyscraper and gated community in the land.

The public space of the UK is a crime scene. It is curious that none of our leading politicians choose to see it that way.