The British government’s response to the effects of Covid-19 allows us to draw some obvious, if bleak, conclusions about its attitude to arts and culture. July’s eventual ‘rescue package’ for the beleaguered cultural sector was focused on preserving its ‘crown jewels’ while overlooking smaller and independent venues and companies, and ignored the question of freelancers and self-employed cultural workers, particularly musicians, often not eligible for employment support schemes. Rishi Sunak’s message that musicians and other workers must ‘adapt and adjust to the new reality’ was a less performatively contemptuous line than Dominic Cummings’ ‘the fucking ballerinas can get to the back of the queue’, but a similar statement of intent.

We are a long way from the approach to arts and culture offered by Labour under Corbyn — a cabinet committee on the arts, a living wage for cultural workers — and even further from its potential implementation. We are also a long way from the Enterprise Allowance’s subversion by independent record labels and community artists in the 1980s, or even from the New Deal for Musicians, a part of New Labour’s coercive ‘welfare to work’ programme which nonetheless offered younger musicians a top-up to their dole to cover access to recording and rehearsal facilities.

Current Tory dogma may be that culture workers need to ‘adjust to the new reality’, but the sector is vital even from a capitalist perspective. Britain’s live music industry has a £1 billion turnover, while the wider nightlife industry generates £66 billion and supports 8 per cent of the country’s workforce. The government’s apparent willingness to sacrifice city-centre and high-street cultural venues and their attendant custom suggests that commercial rents and tourist revenue are no longer guiding concerns.

This scorched-earth approach could indicate a post-pandemic future of cities designed and run — even more so than currently — in the interests of wealthier residents. This would see Covid-19 accelerate the already steamrollering effect of gentrification, rising rents and austerity on the country’s cultural sector, which has seen 35% of dedicated live music venues and 21% of nightclubs close over the past decade.

In a pattern evident from East London to Newcastle’s Ouseburn district to Cardiff’s Womanby Street, creative spaces, often developing in disused industrial areas, form a cultural ecosystem which attracts artists and punters but also, with grim inevitability, corporate investors and property developers. Consequently cultural workers and spaces are forced out not only through higher rents but also by complaints from newer residents about noise and disruption, with the venues responsible for positively reshaping an area closed or limited in their operations to enable the quiet contemplation of life in exorbitantly-priced city-centre apartments.

How local communities and the Left respond to the likely future absence of top-down funding for, or even attention to, arts and culture ties into these wider debates on the role of both the state and commercial interests in assisting or restricting space for cultural expression. Previous models of government support for cultural venues, however well-intentioned, could be flawed in their approach and implementation, focusing on instrumentalising cultural development as part of regeneration strategies and imposing the agendas of external agencies, rather than responding to local priorities.

Alternative strategies to this can draw on a number of developments for potential inspiration and direction. The Left has seen calls for a resurrection of the multipurpose leisure, cultural, and political spaces, built and financed through local subscription models, that formed a cornerstone of early industrial working-class communities. Modernised prototypes for such spaces arguably exist in the country’s locally-run social centres — fragile but with proven sustainability — which function variously as cafés, bars, reading-rooms, venues for live music, drama productions and film screenings, and as sites of community support, advice, socialising, and organising.

Could the collectivist energies that fuelled the flourishing of mutual aid networks at the start of the pandemic also form part of supporting, sustaining, or establishing more community-led cultural spaces, including facilities for recording, rehearsal, exhibition, and performance, with their activities resourced and directed by those taking part as both artists and audiences? This would make local and popular agency vital in the shaping of popular culture. It would also place cultural activity at the centre of community vitality, rather than being an optional extra or dependent on top-down benevolence — especially as it becomes increasingly clear that, in culture as in so much else, we are now reliant on our own resources.