On 2 March, I watched Policy Exchange’s ‘History Matters’ conference. It was, to put it bluntly, a mess, opening with classic dog whistles about how cancel culture is out of control, and closing with the Secretary of State for Culture, Media, and Sport Oliver Dowden talking vaguely about some leftist pressure groups that are apparently bullying museums into following their radical agendas by pulling funding – a claim that sits oddly beside his own threats to cut public funding if museums don’t act ‘impartially’.

Dowden was reluctant to name these groups, or pull up any specific examples of institutions that have been attacked by what he called the ‘nihilist left’, but he repeatedly insisted that he sees it as his role to step in and ‘defend the interests of the wider public’.

The Policy Exchange interview was largely public image management for Dowden: his interview with Trevor Phillips was toothless and uncritical, with Dowden’s insistence that he didn’t want to meddle in the work of museums going unchecked. But for some viewers, it will have demonstrated lack of understanding on the behalf of the culture secretary about what museums actually do – and, perhaps more predictably, about the experiences of the people who work in them.

It’s tempting to try and see this event as an echo chamber. The speakers broadly agreed with each other, and the handful of questions that came in from the audience either confirmed that bias or went unanswered. Nothing meaningful happened; no decisions were made, or changes announced.

But it didn’t take place in isolation. On 25 February, the Guardian broke the news of the latest round of job cuts and a fresh restructuring at the Victoria and Albert Museum. According to the Museum Association, cuts are expected to be made to 20 percent of curatorial jobs, alongside another 20 percent elsewhere.

The museum will move away from its current material-focused narrative to a chronological model for Europe and America; Asian collections will merge with the theatre and performance department, and absorb collections from ‘sub-Saharan Africa and the African diaspora’. The V&A is only the latest cultural institution to announce redundancies, but so far it’s also the only one to couple them with such a massive thematic restructuring.

One could argue, as some at the Policy Exchange event did, that museum workers should prioritise keeping their jobs and preparing to reopen over culture war conversations about collections – a position which implies that these two issues are unrelated. On the most basic level, the government, which funds these institutions, evidently has a preferred model of British history and British culture, and when restructures leave staff competing for far fewer jobs, employees are forced to prove that they can assimilate to that ideological model to justify their right to stay.

In that, the experience of museum employees mirrors that of university staff: in trying to centre ‘free speech’ as the prevailing issue facing these institutions, the government buries the fact that free speech of all kinds stops being your most pressing problem when you’re facing unemployment in the midst of a jobs crisis, or when you’re worried about paying your rent.

More broadly, one might place the V&A restructure in the larger context of the continued gutting of the creative industries: a decade of attrition by Tory governments, brought to a head by the inadequate furlough and financial support for the overwhelmingly precarious arts workers, has created an anxious and paranoid museum culture.

If museums had secure funding, Dowden wouldn’t be able to hold them to ransom like this; if staff had job security, they would be free to be bolder in the stories they tell and the research they conduct. From within and without, museums are being pushed towards a muted role as pretty show boxes, not spaces of research and engaging storytelling.

The relentless slide towards a fully casualised or outsourced museum workforce as a way to reduce training and hiring costs is part of this. Every wave of redundancies represents a destruction of expertise that these museums will struggle to regain, and a subsequent narrowing of focus onto what is most commercially viable or in line with the desires of trustees and donors.

It’s not coincidental that the job cuts announced at institutions like the Tate and the Southbank Centre this year disproportionately affect BAME and lower-paid employees – demographics that the government likely does not perceive as the primary consumers of arts and history offerings more regularly tailored towards the wealthy and the white, who have the cash to substitute its own funding shortfalls.

If Dowden really wanted to see a flourishing museum sector and a meaningful British creative industry, he could secure funding and keep out of it. Instead, with these vague threats and the conspiratorial talk of mysterious rouge curators shoving their leftist agendas on the poor unsuspecting public, he makes it clear that this is about control.

Museum layoffs and restructures triggered by a lack of funding contribute to this goal: the defence of museum workers at all levels (even at the most conservative institutions) and the safeguarding of the expertise they hold is an essential part of resisting nationalist nostalgia.

Museums can be machines for conservative or radical thought: in a post-pandemic world where labour abuses are becoming more commonplace, the latter means recognising that what’s hung on the walls of an exhibition hall is tied directly to the treatment of the person doing the hanging.